


only to give contrast to the light

by weird_bird (2weird4)



Category: Batgirl (Comics), Birds of Prey (Comic), DCU (Comics), Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, F/F, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-06
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-11-09 04:41:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 26,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11097105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/2weird4/pseuds/weird_bird
Summary: After a career-ending injury by a kaiju, former Jaeger pilot Barbara Gordon has built a new life for herself with her Breach-monitoring program Oracle--but she's also built new walls. When she meets young, talented Cassandra Cain, wounded in a different way, Barbara must decide how much she will risk for her, and whether those walls can come down.





	1. Dream

“Carrie says some of Wu-San’s research is going to make it into Cain’s next book,” Harper chit-chats as she hands Barbara a tablet to sign.

Adjusting her glasses on her nose, Barbara twiddles the stylus and reads the report. “He should publish her notes on their own and spare her reputation. And if Cain makes another pop psychology ‘donation’ to our library--”

“We’re burning the books for warmth, I know.” 

Barbara grumbles and draws her shawl more snugly around her shoulders. Once she’s read the details to her satisfaction, she signs off on it with a hurried loop and turns her attention back to her monitors. A plume of blue. 

She tenses.

Just a bubble of gas, she determines with an eyeball. It’s possible she’s calibrated it to oversensitivity, but this long without an attack and she’s getting antsy.

They all are.

Harper’s lingering behind her. During peak Shatterdome activity, she would be tossing the tablet at her and running back to her babies, as she calls the two-thousand-pound Jaegers in her care. But apparently the lull has lasted long enough that even Harper’s run out of ideas for loving tinkering on the Jaegers sitting dormant in the bay. 

“What have you got there, Doctor Gordon?” Harper inches closer.

Barbara sighs. It’s not that she’s opposed to collaboration. The global program that she’s built is evidence enough of that. It’s just that in physical space, she prefers to work alone. Nevertheless, she rolls her chair back a pace to allow Harper a better view of the monitors. “Updated Oracle.”

Harper whistles. “We’re hosting a livestream party for your next talk on it, just so you know. Anissa’s making seven-layer dip. I’d invite you, but...guess you’re getting the live experience.” Panning over the glowing map, she clicks here and there to read chunks of data. “I still don’t see why they couldn’t hold the symposium here for once. The conference hall’s gathering dust.”

“Most people wouldn’t name Alaska as the hottest conference destination of the 2020s.” Barbara gives Harper a mild look over the top of her glasses. “Most people don’t put Anchorage as their first choice for stationing.”

She finds the dubiously affectionate nickname for the Anchorage Shatterdome appropriate: the Icebox. The PPDC is energy-conscious enough that it’s never _toasty_ even inside the building. 

When Barbara does get out of LOCCENT for an afternoon, a few gusts of knik wind warm the air and then leave her chilly again. Barbara doesn’t get out much. It’s on purpose--mostly.

“This is a happening place, Doctor Gordon,” Harper insists as she tucks the tablet under her arm. “I’m _telling_ you.”

Weather aside, Barbara feels this Shatterdome has little to offer. It’s one of the more neglected and understaffed Shatterdomes, not considered an attractive outpost. The only reason she applied here was because of the amount of space and time she should have with a less active LOCCENT to build and operate Oracle. 

Her ambitions have always been bigger than this place. So she struggles to understand what a promising young engineer like Harper is doing here when she could be in L.A. or Hong Kong, real epicenters for J-Tech innovation.

“I’m listening,” Barbara calls after her retreating blue-haired head, “and I’m still waiting.”

Harper’s laugh booms off the industrial concrete walls, and Barbara shakes her head.

Not that she needs this to be a happening place. More trouble is the last thing she needs in her life. Nothing would make her happier than her world-class Pacific-spanning K-Event predicting technology officially losing its purpose in six months’ time.

As she sits back, she notices a cup of tea that even in her sleep deprivation, she would have remembered making and bringing to her station. It had to have been Harper.

Curling her hands around the cup to soak in its warmth, she takes a sip, brow knitting. Relax, she tells herself. Sit back. Have a conversation with someone.

Maybe after her conference call with Nagasaki in an hour, she’ll bundle herself up and get some fresh air, grab a sandwich from the brave little coastal cafe that half the Icebox is placing bets on already. 

Drawing inwards to the exclusion of everyone and concentrating outwards to the detriment of herself are not the only options.

Then a shadow passes over one of the cameras, and she snaps forward, focused again.

A fish.

Maybe she _should_ get out more often. 

 

Metal tearing away in front of her vision, a shower of sparks, a roar and a flash of a ridged blue throat--then the plunge back into the water, a mouthful of salt--crushing pressure at her back and legs, crushing _crushing_ \--

and then nothing.

Waking, Barbara jerks upright and grabs for her thighs. Her head splits with pain where it collided with the ceiling, but it’s when her fumbling hands can’t feel her legs that she has to swallow back a sob.

She’s not held in a vice of twisted metal anymore, but she’s still gasping for oxygen. Bending over her lap, she sees that her clawing nails have drawn a bead of blood from the skin exposed by her shorts.

Barbara breathes. Tries to breathe.

Right now, her basement room--accessible by ramp, unlike the upper residential rooms--feels terrifyingly airless. The walls close in on her. Constrict.

Since Barbara paralyzed her lower body, she’s been working hard on upper body strength. Some of her cardigans even feel tight in the arm nowadays. Exertion isn’t what’s making her biceps tremble as she levers herself out of bed and into her chair. 

Once she’s wiped the blood off her legs the best that she can, she throws a blanket over her lap. Not like her legs were pretty to look at before the fact, anyway.

The crash and bang of Jaeger repair and testing shouldn’t, in theory, be the best thing for Barbara to hear at the moment, but it’s better than ringing in her ears. 

In the aftermath of a kaiju takedown, the bay is a hive of activity, or as much as they manage here with their small crew. 

There’s Leslie only now leading a limping Anissa off to medbay. As they don’t have a full Strike Force here, they often loan out their one Jaeger, Amazon Thunder, to other Shatterdomes. Barbara had only left LOCCENT that night when she confirmed that Anissa and Grace were headed back to Anchorage after a mission with Vladivostok. 

To the left she spots Carrie chatting to Grace and surreptitiously scraping something gooey off of Amazon Thunder’s flank while she’s distracted staring after Anissa.

Bypassing the others, she gravitates to Harper. She never thanked her for the tea. 

Harper seems busy, though, jotting away something on a tablet and nodding away at a muffled voice coming out of the prototype helmet she jammed on her latest guinea pig.

She’s about to wheel away and leave her to it when Harper looks up, the glare of fluorescence off her septum piercing not quite able to disguise her guarded expression. “Doctor Gordon, hey. Thought you were getting some shut-eye?”

Keep it simple. “Couldn’t sleep.”

Behind Harper, the woman who has been graciously modeling the prototype helmet pulls it off and shakes out her tight black curls. “You should be sleeping like a baby. Without Oracle, Vladivostok would be borscht.”

Like Barbara’s father in Los Angeles, Helena took her promotion as an increase in duties rather than an increase in perks. 

With the military roots of the PPDC and the military background of many of its members, including highly-decorated Helena, strict delineation of duty is more traditional, but at the Icebox, everyone’s always buried up to the elbows in everybody else’s work. That’s the only way they get it done. 

As such, it’s not a total shock to see Helena as a helmet model, though Barbara would have preferred a warning so she could look a little more put-together in front of her commanding officer.

“Thank you, Marshal.” The youngest Marshal of any Shatterdome and with the spine to match, Helena doesn’t exactly hand out pats on the back. Her praise makes Barbara feel genuinely satisfied with her work.

If only it was Oracle keeping her up tonight instead, her future and not her past.

“I’ll let you get back to it.” Helena hands the helmet off to Harper and then narrows her eyes at Barbara. “And I’ll let _you_ get back to bed.”

Once Helena has left, and their shoulders can loosen a little, Harper sits right down on the foot of one of the Jaegers and beckon.

Barbara rolls forward, raising her eyebrows in question. “Thanks for the tea,” she offers while it’s on her mind. “I’m sorry if I was short with you.” 

Harper waves it off. “It’s good you’re here. I have something I wanted to show you.” From the portfolio under her arm--she’s old-fashioned in _some_ ways--she flips past several pages and produces the one she wants with an unusually tentative expression.

Barbara’s breath catches in her throat. One of her hands goes to press over her chest as she stares down at the sketch.

The Jaeger is familiar and unfamiliar.

While Barbara’s old machine was one of the tallest ever assembled, this one looks to be atypically short and slim. Lightweight, fast-moving, lacking much firing capacity, unlike the big guns of Barbara’s Jaeger. There aren’t too-similar color choices (in fact, no swatches have been selected off to the side yet).

There’s only one recognizable element in the sketch. With the Jaeger’s arms spread, wings sweep underneath, wings that will help it glide through the ocean.

“I was just thinking--”

“What were you thinking?” Barbara all but snaps. The paper shakes in her hand, and she drops it to her lap.

“I wanted to ask your permission first,” Harper says swiftly. “We have the funding, but we haven’t begun the construction. I--wanted to ask you first,” she repeats.

Barbara opens her eyes and looks down at the design again.

“The wings were a brilliant design innovation.” Harper’s voice falters, and she allows Barbara her silence.

Oh, Barbara remembers. It wasn’t that long ago, after all, even if it feels like another lifetime.

She remembers how thrilled she was when she saw it the first time with her copilot at her side. Their maiden voyage, what a smooth ride through the blue. The edge it gave them in all their future fights.

And when their beautiful girl was half a wreck, engines sputtering and guns failing, she remembers how the wings had pulled them to shore one last time and assured their discovery and rescue.

“The wings are what saved us.” Barbara’s words slip out quieter than she wants. 

Out of her peripheral vision, she can see Harper bite her lip. She reaches out to take the sketch from her, assuming that she’s been rejected.

She clutches at the paper, not ready to give it up yet. “It’s a good idea,” Barbara tells her honestly. Both she and Harper ignore the tears behind her glasses. 

She doesn’t _own_ the wings. But if Harper hadn’t asked--well. She’s glad she asked.

“I have other designs approved by the brass,” Harper ventures. “I wouldn’t have gotten to that one for a while anyway. I’ll busy building this gorgeous lady right now.” She pats the foot on which she’s perched. “She’s a more conventional beauty.”

“What made you think of my--of that design?” Barbara has to ask when she recovers her voice. “I’m--not saying no.”

Harper rushes to explain herself. “I always have,” she begins. Not that Barbara really knows her as well as she should for having worked with her for a year, but suddenly she looks shyer than she’s ever seen her. “It was _you,_ Doctor Gordon, it was _your_ Jaeger that brought me here, that made me want to do this work for the rest of my life. You were my, um, my inspiration,” she finishes, fidgeting. “And stuff.”

Barbara stares at her.

In her perception, her career as a Ranger was a failure. Never mind everything she achieved before: she ended up a disclaimer to intrepid aspiring pilots, a footnote in waiver forms, a _precautionary tale._

Barbara hasn’t thought of herself as an _inspiration_ for a long time.

Exhaling, she nods a wry go-ahead. “You’re going to make a lucky pilot very happy someday.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> come say hi on my [tumblr!](http://2-weird-4.tumblr.com/)


	2. Renaissance

Barbara proceeds with caution, initially distrustful of her wheels on the wet tarmac.

Her chair wasn’t originally built for this; when she left L.A. with it, she was advised to avoid wet spots. Unfortunately, instead of taking a comfortable retirement like so many assumed she would, she’s ended up right back at a Shatterdome, which is really just one big wet spot.

Turns out Harper made well on her offer to “trick out” her chair, as it glides without skidding. She even outstrips an exuberant Carrie.

“There was this paper in _Journal of Bacteriology_ \--it was fantastic, you should check it out--’Charting five years of fluctuations in marine flora biodiversity due to Breach-induced mineralization’--” Carrie gestures enthusiastically and then yanks her rain-spattered, green-tinted goggles off her head to wipe on her shirt.

Drying her own glasses, Barbara squints at the cargo plane touching down in front of them. She’s agreed to give Carrie a hand with her shipment, seeing as it’s a slow day for her, but she forgot that meant agreeing to _Carrie._ “And now you’re making an attempt to study cross-contamination of kaiju gut flora and hydrothermal vent archaea.” 

Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her until Carrie started spamming the Icebox list serv with micrographs of kaiju stomach lining tissue that kaiju could _have_ gut flora.

Then again, it’s not her field. And yet, it’s not _not_ her field. Kaiju changed the world. Fresh convergence of knowledge, new sub-sub specialties. K-Science and J-Tech are both part of what some are calling the Breach Renaissance, an explosion of innovation across STEM. STEAM, some would say, with a post-kaiju perspective portrayed in visual art, film, and literature.

Also in “literature.” David Cain comes to mind. 

The last time Barbara saw his face was in a TED talk about implementing lessons learned from feral children in education.

Despite the number of books he’s churned out chock-full of crackpot theory on the Neural Handshake and the third eye or the consumption of kaiju organ meat to accelerate learning, the man hasn’t been seen in public for over a decade. 

In his former life, Cain was a brilliant educational psychologist, winning grants and awards, peppering podcasts. Barbara used one of his journal articles on early childhood cognition as a source for an undergrad paper. However, he paled in comparison to his wife. 

The fact that the bio-harvest shipment coming in for Carrie is from Hong Kong isn’t helping Barbara’s nostalgia. 

Rolling a refrigerated container, she watches Carrie run ahead as the hatch hisses open, not envying her ability to run as much as her energy to do so.

What imbued Barbara with that much academic fervor when she was Carrie’s age? Maybe meeting her idol.

Two minutes. She barely hung onto the receiving end of the firmest handshake she’d ever felt. Rehearsals and repeats be damned, she fumbled her question anyway.

Nevertheless, with clear eyes and a crisp voice without a hint of condescension, Sandra Wu-San answered her. Barbara could recite what she said to her word-for-word today. _”It’s not just possible, it’s_ probable _that we’ll encounter kaiju of higher intelligence and toxicity in the future. Of course we need to improve Ranger training, but ultimately it doesn’t matter how good our pilots are. If we can’t predict these kaiju, we can never prepare for them.”_

 

When Barbara visibly withered, Wu-San leaned in with a sharp little smile. _”Don’t listen to me. If you’re onto something, don’t let it go.”_

Barbara hoists the box Carrie hands her into the refrigerated container, biceps straining. Setting it down, she rolls out her shoulders and nods in confirmation that she can take another. 

If K-DAY triggered the Breach Renaissance, Wu-San was the Renaissance woman. Nobel-Prize-winning neurobiologist, championship-topping martial artist, and in her last years, an outstanding Jaeger pilot at the Hong Kong Shatterdome. She’d died defending Hong Kong from a Category IV, Snakeback.

Today, Hong Kong has sent them what they believe to be kaiju liver specimens for Carrie, as well as some old Jaeger parts Harper had requested. They’ve fit a lot in the belly of the plane, and once it’s cleaned out, Carrie will have to reload it with research material the Icebox was sending over to Hong Kong. It’s a grand exchange.

Just as Carrie dips inside to check that they’re all clear, Barbara sees a flurry of movement. Thanks to budgeting, they’re the only ones out here.

So what--?

Like something from a horror movie, a small bloodied face stares out of the darkness.

Barbara freezes in shock. “There’s someone in there,” she says, knowing how irrational she sounds.

“Yeah, I know.” Carrie props her hands on her hips. “I’m right here.”

“No--behind you--”

Carrie screeches and stumbles backwards out of the plane, almost falling onto Barbara. 

Barbara, steadying her, fights her animal instincts. “Maybe it’s one of the flight crew. They look hurt.” She looks at Carrie. “I’m going to go in after them.”

“Are you crazy?” Carrie’s eyes flick unmistakably down to Barbara’s wheels. 

Why, of all people, would the _defenseless_ one go in first? Right. 

Reaching down, Barbara disengages her brakes and wheels up the ramp into the darkness. Quickly, she unlocks her phone and shines it into the dark.

It’s just a girl.

Crumpled to her hands and knees. Badly hurt. Blood smearing over her shaved head and running down the sides of her neck from her ears. Skin waxy under the red. 

Looking up at Barbara, she shakes and collapses.

Barbara acts fast. 

Some awkward lowering from her chair and a dipping motion and she manages to work the girl into her lap with minimal jarring. “Need Doctor Thompkins right now!” she yells at Carrie, checking frantically for the girl’s pulse, staring down at her face. 

Within the wilderness of the girl’s brown eyes, Barbara sees a deep and strange intelligence before her fragile eyelids fall closed.

 

  
“Between hypoxia and hypothermia, it’s a wonder she’s still alive,” Leslie says, mouth pinched sourly. “Are there any updates on who she might be?”

“Carrie’s calling Hong Kong right now.” Barbara looks down at the girl lying on the table, hooked up to a half-dozen machines.

The pilot had no idea she was there. Once they’d gotten the girl to the medbay, Barbara and Carrie combed over the equipment recovered from the plane for clues. They found tarps scavenged together to make a warm shelter as well as torn-open boxes. Reeourcefully, the girl used an emergency oxygen tank and mask from the Jaeger gear and apparently scooped out handfuls of the ice used to store kaiju organs for water. 

It didn’t explain the miracle of her survival or how she’d ended up in the plane in the first place.

“You go as well,” Leslie told Barbara. Sparing a moment’s attention away from her now-stabilized patient, she squeezed Barbara’s shoulder. “Update them on her condition.”

Barbara scrubs her hands over her face and nods. Allows herself just a moment before her hands fall to her wheels to propel herself down the hallway to the conference room.

Alarms blare off the walls, but it’s not coming from the Anchorage Shatterdome.

The Hong Kong Shatterdome, on the other end of the video call, has been thrown into a state of panic. Red lights flash, administrative officials crowd the K-Science personnel. Hardly anything is audible among the overlapping voices.

“Drift--lab room--unsupervised--Cain--”

“Research collaboration will have to wait.” The Marshal’s voice booms across the rest. “All non-emergency Shatterdome functions are suspended while we resolve the current situation.”

“The current situation?” Carrie repeats, turning back to shoot a look at Barbara, shaking her head. She hasn’t been able to get a word in edgewise, it seems.

“Doctor David Cain’s daughter is missing.”

Barbara wheels forward. “No, she isn’t.”

 

“Replay the video,” Leslie says with a heavy frown.

“It’s clearly her.” Barbara nevertheless restarts the clip so that they can watch Cain give his lecture again. Beside him, their former Jane Doe clicks through his slides for him. 

There’s something of her father about the shape of her mouth, but Barbara really thinks she should have recognized Wu-San in the line of the girl’s nose, brows, jaw. 

“I know. I’m trying to make some more observations.” Leslie taps her stylus on her tablet. “So the security feed says that after this, the two did not exit the Shatterdome...”

Barbara could barely stomach the grainy feed that she had to help unscramble.  
Cain had done his research, covered his bases. If only he could have applied his genius otherwise.

Security footage shows that after the lecture, rather than leaving for home, Cain sneaked his daughter down to the neural interfacing lab. With the staff on lunch break, it was low on security. He had all the equipment he needed, and the timing was as right as it ever would be for his insane plan.

He tried to Drift with his daughter.

A moment where the Neural Handshake must have worked. Under the helmets, her face tight with stress, his alight with victory.

Before it all went wrong. 

Cain twitched, then lashed against his chair. He snatched the helmet in both hands, but he couldn’t disengage the technology fast enough. 

Over and over again, his daughter shuddered, eyelids fluttering madly and mouth open on a rending scream.

He continued to struggle. The fight went out of his body. His limbs went slack. 

As his daughter’s chest rose and fell rabbit-fast, he choked and didn’t stop. 

He stopped breathing.

Cain died.

Barbara saw where the girl realized what happened to her father. Wrenching the helmet off her head, she dashed to his side. She checked his heartbeat. She shook him. As denial fell away, her face morphed into a mask of shock and terror.

Hunted, she took what must have seemed the only option left to her: she fled.

Shatterdomes expose their bare bones. There’s nowhere to hide. At some point, the footage cuts off, and that’s where what they know comes in. The girl must have stowed away in the Anchorage-bound plane. And somehow, she survived the flight.

 

“Remarkable,” Leslie murmurs, not for the first time, as she goes over some of the girl’s brain scans. She woke once, was run through a battery of tests, and sipped some water before she was back down again. 

“And the public had no idea she existed?” Barbara studies her face as she sleeps.

“Not quite. She was mentioned a handful of times in profiles of Wu-San. She was at her Nobel Banquet, and I even saw her once myself when she was a baby. But she dropped off the map when Cain did.”

With the Icebox short-staffed and no kaiju attacks since the Cat II that gave Amazon Thunder so much trouble, Barbara has been helping out in the medbay. She’s beginning to be invested in this girl’s story. After chancing a nosy glance at the scant records Leslie unearthed, she discovered the girl was only sixteen.

Sixteen. At sixteen, Barbara wasn’t so strong. She thinks she would have never been strong if she didn’t have to be.

“I need to get back to LOCCENT.” Barbara rolls herself back from the table. “But will you--call me? If you need the help?”

Leslie scrutinizes her, and it takes a lot for Barbara not to squirm under her steely eyes. Barbara might be relatively senior here, but Leslie’s known her since she was a kid and she makes her _feel_ young. 

When everyone still thought her spine could be treated, Leslie came forward with the most radical treatments. And when Barbara’s path had taken a turn towards hers again, she helped her move into her new quarters, helped her move into her new life.

Leslie has known Barbara at many stages. She’s seen Barbara retreat within herself, and she’s never withdrawn her extended hand.

For that, it’s hard to hold Leslie’s gaze and pretend there’s nothing more to this.

She adjusts the girl’s IV line. Voice gentle with knowing, she tells her, “I’ll call you when she wakes.” When the girl shifts, Leslie pauses for a moment, then smiles down at her.

 

Canny eyes move between Leslie and Barbara. Despite lying without moving, she seems completely awake.

Barbara feels she should offer an explanation for her presence. “I work at LOCCENT.”

A clear flicker of recognition in her eyes at the words.

“My name is Barbara,” she says carefully. “What’s yours?”

They do have her name, of course, from her records and confirmed by the Corps in Hong Kong, who are still trying to cope with the whole debacle of Cain’s death. 

While Leslie claims she has no brain damage from either the failed Drift or the arduous plane voyage, the first thing she told Barbara when she came to see her is _She can’t talk._

It’s already been determined that her vocal cords seem intact, and she has no issues like palsy which would affect breathing patterns required for speech; therefore, this seems psychological rather than physiological.

So as a start, they’re trying to get her to say her name. Testing for amnesia, trauma, anything. They need to do their best to make her better until her next-of-kin can be contacted.

The girl often makes a little noise in her throat when she’s trying to say a word, but for this, she clamps her lips closed. Rather than inability, refusal.

Arriving at resignation after a long silence, Barbara tries, “Is your name Cassandra?” 

In response, she gives a tiny, tight nod. 

Not quite the confirmation they wanted, but she responds to her name, and that’s _something._ Barbara’s own crawling recovery has taught her that an inch is as good as a mile.

Barbara senses her tension, so she offers her a water bottle and a smile. “Hi, Cassandra.”

Wonder of wonders, the girl’s lips curve just a little in return once she lowers the water bottle. “Hi,” Cassandra whispers back. 

 

 

A week passes with Cassandra in limbo. 

Barbara departs for her talk in San Francisco. Upon her return that Saturday morning, she feels fired up, ready to get cracking on incorporating some new proposals by her colleagues into the program. Once she’s dumped her bags in the room, she goes by the medbay.

Cross-legged on the bed, Cassandra scrolls through a tablet, her eyes flicking back and forth.

“What are you reading?” Cassandra does not respond at first, and Barbara looks over at Leslie.

“She’s fine,” Leslie reassures her. “Give her a moment.”

Eventually, Cassandra looks up and tilts her head to the side, observing Barbara. 

“I was giving a talk on Oracle in San Francisco,” Barbara offers. 

Harper called her last night when she was at the airport to update her on Shatterdome goings-on, including on Cassandra. Apparently Carrie’s questions about her favorite music garnered no response, but she spent five hours watching Harper crank away at Amazon Thunder’s wiring. Talk of Jaeger and kaiju seems to be the only way to get through to her. They won’t lack for conversational topics; everyone at the Icebox loves to talk shop.

Cassandra nods quick in recognition of the word (so she knows _LOCCENT_ and _Oracle_ but not Beyonce or Red Hot Chili Peppers) and scoots forward to the edge of the bed, as if to emphasize that she’s listening.

Pieces are starting to come together about Cassandra, but the jigsaw’s not all the way finished yet. It’s a group effort.

Leslie’s monitoring their interaction closely. “She’s been cooped up here for a week. I think Anissa was going to take her out to that cafe.”

“Instead of Cafe Doomed--” Cafe _Dazed_ being the actual name of the new cafe by the beach, but Anissa and Carrie’s jokes are getting to Barbara. “--why don’t I take her to LOCCENT with me?”

At _that,_ Cassandra jumps right off of the end of the bed. 

Leslie’s eyebrows jump up, too. “Looks like Cassandra’s made her choice.”

Actually, Barbara surprised herself with the suggestion, too. Instinct has never been the way she operates. Barbara is where she is because of logic and reason.

Because when she was lying in her own hospital bed, when she was straining to pull away the gauze of pain and glimpse what was left of her life to live, it was cool mathematical distance that had brought her back to the world. Itemized pros and cons lists. Precise letters of intent. No more was it a pulse between brains guiding her to run and fight and win. She was alone in her own head, then on and forever afterwards. 

She was alone.

When Barbara starts off to LOCCENT, Cassandra follows like a duckling. She’s wearing some spare hospital scrubs with an old lady cardigan that, admittedly, could be one of Barbara’s, but is more likely Leslie’s, so the shiver that runs over her probably isn’t from the cold.

The tunnels the brain leads one down during Drift, especially one as traumatic as the one that killed her father, aren’t all that different than the dim innards of the Shatterdome. Cassandra must have nightmares, too, Barbara thinks as she boots up Oracle. 

Although Barbara’s dreamscape these past few nights hasn’t been haunted by anything so much as big brown eyes.

Cassandra assesses her with those eyes for a moment, assesses the desk, and chooses to stand, hands crossed behind her back.

“I’m enhancing the capabilities of Oracle to detect Category V kaiju.” Barbara looks over her shoulder at her. “Pretty...cool, huh?”

Brow wrinkling, Cassandra shakes her head. She’s struggling for words, Barbara realizes, not so much rejecting that it might be cool (which would only offend Barbara a little). Her hands draw shapes in the air, and she shakes her head again. “Four,” she grinds out.

“Category V,” Barbara repeats as she tries to understand Cassandra’s...correction? Ah. “We’ve only seen up to Category IV so far,” she concedes. “This is supposed to predict kaiju of higher toxicity and intelligence than we’ve encountered so far.”

Cassandra bites her lip and shakes her head with an exaggerated wince.

“No. No, not good,” Barbara agrees. Spinning around in her chair, she pulls up the tablet to show her some of the proposed alterations to Oracle to increase its capacity. Barbara thinks it won’t be long before Oracle can predict more advanced kaiju than are on record. “What do you think?”

She gets one good, close look at the schematics. Then, tentatively, she holds out a hand.

Picking up her stylus, Barbara plonks it in her palm.

Cassandra shoots Barbara an unsure glance. It looks like she has to make certain Barbara won’t disapprove. Once she has, she angles her body across the desk and scatches out a part of the camera placement schematic, redrawing it and adding a helpful arrow to the block of information she pulled from on ocean currents to make the connection that Barbara might have never made.

Usually, Barbara doesn’t like people being in her space while she works. She doesn’t even work with music in her ears, the only noises in LOCCENT other than the ambient hum of her machines the click of her mouse and the tap of her keys. 

But Cassandra is so very quiet. Even her breathing is soft.

At her elbow, she watches. She points sometimes when Barbara pauses, clarifies details she didn’t even think to look for yet. 

This kid knows exactly what she’s doing, and it doesn’t make any sense to Barbara. She’s too young to have been through the academy, and there are no records of her having gone through training anywhere. In fact, there are no records of her going to _school._

She can clearly interpret complex diagrams, though, as she ends up _tsk_ ing at a blueprint from a masters student doing work on the Pitcairn Islands.

Barbara has to smirk slightly. “I wasn’t impressed by him, either.”

That small smile again. In casual dismissal, Cassandra exits the page promptly, and Barbara can’t help but laugh.

In the course of that single afternoon, they make remarkable progress.

 

Barbara doesn’t keep track of time. She rarely refers to her clock to determine when she’s done for the day because she rarely _wants_ to be done for the day. There’s always more to do, and she always wants to do it. She doesn’t often break for meals, either. The good thing about this desk gig is that she has no copilot she’ll take down with her if she passes out from low blood sugar. 

Her first indication of the passage of hours is the grumble of Cassandra’s stomach.

Barbara pauses. Her lips twitch. When Barbara turns around to face her, though, Cassandra looks more _ashamed_ than amused.

Lean arms twine over her belly like Cassandra could block out its complaints of hunger.

“What’s wrong?” 

Cassandra shakes her head and tries to reach past her to the computer, to get right back to work and ignore her bodily needs.

As much as she lets bodily complaints slide when it comes to herself, Barbara’s _not_ about to go head-to-head with a teenager’s metabolism. “Hey. We can take a break.”

Cassandra keeps clicking.

“It’s okay.” Barbara gives her wrist a squeeze.

Instantly, Cassandra goes rigid all over. Her eyes drop to her feet.

Barbara’s stomach sinks past her ankles, and she hastily draws her hand into her lap. That was not the reaction she intended--her touch was supposed to be a reassurance. “ _I’m_ hungry,” she tries instead. “Let’s go get lunch.”

 

‘“Cafe Dazed? More like Cafe Deserted.”

“How many puns can you make, Anissa?” Barbara groans, fiddling with her straw. 

The place is actually adorable. Whimsical. Perhaps Barbara should have given Harper and Carrie a sterner lecture for placing bets on its longevity.

When they first arrive, Cassandra studies the chalkboard menu for a long time, hands folded behind her back in what Barbara’s already starting to think of as her customary pose.

Barbara didn’t need Leslie to point out the signs of _neglect_ in Cassandra’s upbringing. On the walk here, she studied the unremarkable sights with such amazement. How many places has she been? Maybe she’s never been to a restaurant.

“Can’t decide what you want?” There are a couple dozen items, drinks with vanilla and strawberry and butterscotch, pressed sandwiches and pastries.

Hesitating, Cassandra shakes her head, then traces the shape of the letters with a fingertip, so light she doesn’t disturb the chalk.

Barbara exchanges an incredulous glance with Anissa. 

“Do you want me to read it out to you?” Anissa suggests quietly.

Cassandra barely responds to the read-aloud menu, either, so Barbara ends up getting her a hot chocolate and a muffin. In the end, happily wolfs both.

When she meets Anissa’s eyes over Cassandra’s head again, Barbara can see they’ve reached the same damning conclusion. Cassandra, who is _sixteen,_ who seems _brilliant,_ cannot read.

The three of them, with the exception of the tired-looking cashier, the barista in the checkered dress, and sweetly enough, the barista’s pet teacup pig, are the only ones in the cafe. 

(The pig’s probably a health inspector’s nightmare, and most likely a gimmick by the failing cafe, but Cassandra seems enchanted, absorbed as soon as the pig walks over to her and looks up at her with beady black eyes, so Barbara will give them a pass.)

Anissa doesn’t seem wholly happy that she won’t get to see many new faces. On the other hand, Barbara is secretly glad. She had her fill of random strangers at the conference, people who gawk at her legs and tiptoe around her past while reminding her of the future she won’t get to have.

Cassandra seems at ease with the cafe’s emptiness, too. 

Yet she’s watchful. She’s always watchful. Glued to the window, she scans every passerby head to foot, whether seabird waddling along the sidewalk or harried human.

Anissa’s engagement ring keeps catching the late afternoon sunlight.

The proposal didn’t shock anyone, including Barbara, who doesn’t know the couple well. She didn’t hear much about it before or after. However, it’s polite to ask, and no doubt Anissa’s dying to be asked. “So. When’s the wedding?”

“Oh, I’ll tell all, since you seem so interested,” Anissa teases. “It’s okay, Barbara, I’m sure you’ve heard all the gossip.”

Barbara takes a sagely sip of her iced coffee and neither confirms nor denies it.

Grace and Anissa make a great couple. Of course they do. They’ve been each other’s only copilots throughout their careers as Rangers, a little bit of research told Barbara, and they’ve been stationed at the Icebox together longer than anybody else here. 

Sure, they snipe, and sometimes they seem readier to punch each other than a kaiju, real or one of Grace’s simulations, but they _Drift._ They are in sync in a way no humans who haven’t initiated a Neural Handshake are capable of yet.

Anissa talks with affection and excitement about color coordination, and Barbara okays yellow for a summer wedding. A summer wedding located somewhere other than in the Shatterdome, that is--Barbara does check. 

“This isn’t,” Anissa insists, indignant, “about being married to the job.”

Cassandra has her body turned in a way that indicates she’s listening. However, she doesn’t chip in on the debate about color coordination, or later, bridesmaid dresses or cake flavors. It’s either that she doesn’t understand, or it’s that she doesn’t care.

Watching Cassandra stroke the piglet’s round side, her profile silhouetted by the setting sun, Barbara finds it difficult to conceptualize her _not caring._

“Grace is thinking about becoming a Pierce after we get married.” Anissa’s voice warms even more, chin in hand. 

“She likes the in-laws that much?” Barbara needles. That’s a thought, big, brash Grace with such soft edges.

Anissa nods. “It’s been a long time since she’s had a family like that.”

Pop culture would have it that copilots, platonic, familial, romantic, are _soulmates._

The idea’s not baseless, as evidenced by couples like Grace and Anissa.

Barbara may be biased in the cynical direction on this one. But she also has enough empirical evidence from all the Jaeger teams she’s seen, from her training in Lima to her run as a Ranger in L.A. to her position at LOCCENT here, that she can say that for most people, copilot equals soulmate is a bullshit equation.

Two people being Drift-compatible just means that their neuroses won’t kill each other, or at least they haven’t yet.

Barbara has to question the idea of fitting together perfectly. Is it that these “soulmates” were meant to be from the start or that repeated batterings of their brains together molded them into each other’s better half?

Questions easier not to answer, answers kinder not to seek.

Eventually, the barista starts yawning, and they’re shooed out of the cafe. 

Cassandra sneaks the piglet a scrap from her plate on the way out the door, and Anissa picks a path ahead of Barbara to show her all the uneven places on the boardwalk the street-lights don’t illuminate.

 

Being back in LOCCENT again is a relief, it always is, jokes about hermits and caves aside.

They’re back at the Category V predictions again. Barbara has to hold in snickers at some of the art they see. Scientific illustration, _sure._

It’s not really the same problem as drawings of dinosaurs that look torn from fifteenth-century plates of St. George and the Dragon. Dinosaurs are large extinct animals conceptualized too frequently as storybook monstrosities instead with too many teeth and too many clothes, posed ferociously and fabulously and suspiciously without feathers. 

Kaiju have more of a claim to mythological status, and some embellishment is understandable. But somehow she can’t see a kaiju with three tails, one tipped with a trident, striding out of the Pacific anytime soon.

It’s all well and good to be wary of these kinds of kaiju appearing, and predicting patterns of how they’ll emerge, but since her conversation with Wu-San in undergrad, it’s always been in the back of her mind that they have no way to combat these greater threats anyway.

It occurs to Cassandra too. “Jaegers?” she questions. 

Barbara has to work through the glue of her own neural connections to figure out Cassandra’s, but she’s starting to learn how to do it. “What Jaegers can deal with Cat V?” She shakes her head. “None so far.”

Cassandra seems to disagree, making a sort of gesture around her own body and then a motion like something rebounding off of herself.

Shielding, Barbara realizes she’s saying. “Jaegers with superior shielding, yes. Any you have in mind?” 

Cassandra scrolls and clicks and the most famous Jaeger ever built, glossy red and blue and armed like hell, fills the screen.

“Lady Shiva, huh.” 

Barbara doesn’t know how much Cassandra knows about her mother, or whether she remembers her. She seems to know enough, though, to be able to say that if anyone could handle a Category V kaiju, Wu-San could have. While Barbara wholeheartedly admires Wu-San, Snakeback, who killed her, was a Cat IV, so she can’t think that all hope of humanity’s survival died with her.

Sandra Wu-San isn’t here now; her daughter is, and Barbara gets the impression that she can take a lot on her slender shoulders: a Titan in the waiting, a little Atlas.


	3. Probability

Caught under the projector’s multicolored light as she pushes her chair back, Cassandra gives Barbara a reassuring look. All of a sudden, Barbara feels at ease as she was pretending to be about the slightly flashy new graphics explaining a recent addition to Oracle.

Today they’re going through progress reports. They’re informal, no one outside the Icebox crew attending and a relaxed, collegial atmosphere to it all. For Barbara, they’re a marker of each passing year, how far she’s come and also how far she’s left her old life behind.

A month before, Barbara expected she wouldn’t have anything to share but normal annual data. With Cassandra’s help, however, with her quiet perception and hairpin-turn smarts, she has developed a new aspect to the program that could pinpoint a kaiju’s weaknesses before a Jaeger has to size it up face-to-face.

After a successful presentation, she rejoins Cassandra. Thrumming with victory, she exchanges a grin with her, full and toothy.

Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Harper and Carrie gawk like she’s been body-snatched.

Barbara doesn’t feel like somebody else, though. She feels more like _herself_ than ever. Just with--a new aspect.

Everyone begins to filter out of the room once Helena closes out the meeting, with Harper and Carrie shooting her more furtive looks on their way out of the door. Soon, only Leslie, Cassandra, and Barbara remain, gathering up their materials and preparing to head back to work.

“Very illustrative notes you’ve taken, Cassandra.” Leslie peers down over the tops of her glasses at Cassandra’s doodle.

Cassandra taps the screen to enlarge it and smirks, evidently pleased.

More seriously, Leslie adds, “I expect to see great things from you. Both of you.”

Barbara glances at Cassandra. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about that,” she says when she looks back at Leslie. “About Cassandra.”

Without being asked, Cassandra slips out into the corridor.

Barbara does consider calling after her, but perhaps this conversation will be more forthright without her present. Still, it says something that her automatic reaction when it comes to discussion about herself is to leave the room, as if she deserves no part in the conversation

What she has been taught is that she should have no voice, no say in what happens to her.

“I’ve been in touch with her aunt.” Cain’s will named Carolyn Wu-San Cassandra’s guardian, though Barbara doesn’t think much of his right to decide Cassandra’s future with what he has done in her past. “She’s agreed to let Cassandra continue her temporary stay here. She’s planning a visit to meet her soon.”

“Meet her?” Barbara sighs. “She’s never met her, then.”

Leslie shakes her head, lips pressed together.

“Then she’s better off here,” Barbara says with more relief than is probably appropriate.

Cassandra is adjusting here. Happy. Like this is where she’s meant to be.

Then again, this _is_ where she was intended to be.

“I agree,” Leslie concurs after a moment, distracted by reading Cassandra’s files.

There’s a massive investigation on Cain undergoing, miraculously kept out of the public eye for now. The police are turning the small and twisted world he crafted for his daughter upside down, and luckily, Anchorage is being kept up to date.

Ransacking his Hong Kong apartment has been a slow unpeeling of Cassandra’s story. 

The place she grew up after her mother’s death was no home. It was nothing more than an enriched rat cage.

Her room is a microcosm of a very targeted form of child-rearing. Absent are a typical teenager’s movie and music posters; the walls are plastered with blown-up illustrations of kaiju anatomy. Where nostalgia would linger in child’s toys and drawings, wooden puzzles, logic workbooks, and Jaeger models subsitute. Rather than tight jeans or patterned tops like a girl her age might wear, Judo pants and karategi stuff her closet.

Investigators turns up binders full of case studies on feral and otherwise non-verbal children Cain apparently used not to further his academia, but as _instructional manuals_ for raising Cassandra. Alongside it they find electrodes to be stuck on her shaved scalp and worse: equipment for electroconvulsive “therapy,” probes for medically unsound deep brain stimulation.. 

Perhaps hardest to ignore is Cain’s log. In it he recorded the “research” on Cassandra that he considered his life’s work. 

He turned Wu-San’s far-reaching research and the spectrum of her talents into her daughter’s prison.

Every detail uncovered curdles the anger in Barbara’s stomach thicker. Although there is some justice Cain’s death by his own hubris, it’s not enough. The most important part of this equation, this rebalancing of the scales, is justice for Sandra’s daughter.

“If you can confirm that she’s medically stable, then there’s no reason for Cassandra to sleep on a hospital bed every night,” Barbara states, and Leslie nods in agreement. “She needs somewhere more permanent and comfortable to stay.”

Crossing her arms over her chest, Leslie smiles. “Are you offering?”

 

The logs tell the tale. Before Wu-San died fighting Snakeback, Cassandra had a relatively normal childhood. Perhaps she heard more classical music in the womb than most, watched more educational programming, heard more unusual conversations at the dinner table. At four, she remained nonverbal, but she had still had time. She had still had a chance then.

Lady Shiva could not fight off Snakeback. He lost his wife. And so Cain had not raised their daughter. He had _engineered_ her.

If a Jaeger piloted by ordinary Rangers could not be a kaiju killing machine, Cassandra would be.

 

“Cassandra! Cassandra,” Barbara calls after her, wheeling fast to keep up.

Cassandra should certainly be able to hear her, but sometimes it takes her a moment to respond. She shakes her head quick and then turns to meet her eyes, curious, obviously not trying to run away from her.

“You’re going to the medbay?” Barbara gestures down the hallway. “To sleep?” 

Cassandra nods and affects a yawn, drawing a square in the air.

“Hey!” The slang’s on Carrie, no doubt. “You helped me put some of those slides together, so it’s your fault if they put you to sleep. Anyway…” Coming up to Cassandra’s side, she nods in the other direction, towards the ramp. “My room is over there.”

Her face scrunches as it does whenever she’s been told anything she already knows (god forbid Carrie try to tell her anything about Trespasser’s spinal cord, or Harper explain Jaeger armoring). 

“You need somewhere to stay.” Barbara clears her throat. “A home.” 

Cassandra looks at her again, looks _carefully._ “Hm…”

Barbara clears her throat. “Would you like to come stay with me?”

A wide smile spreads across Cassandra’s face. Seizing her hands, she nods emphatically.

 

“We’ll get a frame soon.” For now, Cassandra only has a mattress on the floor.

That doesn’t seem to be her concern. She’s busy wandering around the room, hands behind her back as she inspects Barbara’s various knick-knacks. Dreadfully curious and still keeping as fastidious a distance as a museum curator. That is, until she sniffs Barbara’s lamp.

Barbara gives her a look.

Shrugging, Cassandra flops down onto the mattress and cozies the duvet around her shoulders. Even with eyes closed, she somehow seems alert, at rest but at the ready.

Once Barbara levers herself onto her own bed, she looks over at her. “Happy?”

She can see Cassandra smile at the ceiling. “Hm.”

Rolling her eyes, Barbara switches off the light.

 

Leslie noted to Barbara a few weeks back that physical activity would be good for Cassandra’s health. Cassandra, it seems, got the message without being told.

As soon as Cassandra was off of bed rest, she took to running laps around the Icebox’s perimeter and doing jumping jacks and stretches down its long corridors. Past midnight, she can be found pounding back and forth across the Shatterdome’s pool.

Now that they’re sharing a room, Barbara observes her rigorous routine of pushups and situps through blurry eyes every morning while feeling slightly guilty for not being quite so thorough about her own fitness.

Then Cassandra tries doing chin-lifts on the rickety bars of the bunks, and Barbara has to draw the line _somewhere_. 

With Helena’s permission, Barbara gives Cassandra a tour of the gym. They’ve managed to finagle an access ID for Cassandra from Helena as well, a substitute for the iris scan they couldn’t put in the system. 

In terms of the law, Cassandra exists within an in-between place right now.

Her aunt has readily and repeatedly confirmed to multiple authorities that Cassandra should be allowed to stay at the Shatterdome. Whether she is planning on a more active guardianship later remains unclear. Therefore, her position here is relatively secure.

In a twist of good news, since Cain’s emotional and physical abuse of Cassandra hinged on classified Pan Pacific Defense Corps information, every matter regarding her is a state secret--of _multiple_ states. Journalists and fans and pretty much anybody who isn’t Icebox keeps their noses out of her business simply because they haven’t had one whiff of it.

The bad news is that none of this helps in matters of protocol, for which the PPDC in general, being an arm of international military, and Helena in particular, country-hopping hand-to-heart army brat extraordinaire, are sticklers. Getting Cassandra access to pretty much anything requires a permission slip.

“This is where I usually work out.” Barbara nods to the weights. “And for you, so you don’t pull down the ceiling of our room with you…” She nods to the bars.

Leaping up, Cassandra’s bare feet dangle as she pokes her chin over the top of the bar.

She and her copilot, Barbara remembers, used to compete for who could do the most reps. The memory twinges, but she did win more often.

Once she jumps down again, Cassandra indicates the bar with a smile.

Barbara raises her eyebrows.

Again looking between the bar and Barbara, Cassandra flexes pointedly.

“Fine.” Barbara swivels her chair around to right under the bar, backing up and braking it just against the wall so she can fall back down into it. “Hup.” Grasping the metal join on the wall, she stretches an arm and locks her hand around it, then hauls herself straight with the other. The lower half of her body hangs like a dead weight below her torso now. Breathing harder, Barbara adjusts her posture as best as she can.

For Barbara’s reps, Cassandra holds up all ten fingers to count down on them. Barbara lifts herself up and down, laborious, methodical. When she runs out of fingers, she flashes her a double thumbs-up. 

As Cassandra drops her hands, Barbara drops, too, grunting. With a shake of the head, she rolls out her shoulders. Gratefully, she accepts a water bottle. “You know, I might not be a monkey like you--”

Cassandra frowns. It’s not offense--Cassandra doesn’t really _get_ offended. It’s confusion, apparently.

“Monkey?” Barbara tries a little charades, scratching under her armpits and saying _ooh ooh ah._ She supposes general wildlife knowledge must not have been a vital part of a Jaeger-and-kaiju-based education.

Staring at her like she’s lost her mind, Cassandra _ooh ooh ah_ s back and then laughs at her just as hard as Barbara deserves.

Barbara just sighs. “We’ll have to hook you up with some Animal Planet. What do you want to do right now, though?” She gestures to the treadmill and the nearby stationary bike.  
Cassandra, however, with her hands on her hips, looks past all the standard exercise equipment to the glass door that opens into the combat room.

“Ah. Of course,” Barbara says under her breath. “I think Grace and Anissa might be in there right now.” Grace largely runs the combat and sim rooms; they double up jobs at Anchorage pretty often. On her end, Barbara handles shipments on top of running LOCCENT.

She watches Cassandra stare longingly at the big empty floor, ready for practice sparring. She thinks of that closet full of martial arts clothes. The library of footage of Sandra that Cain must have showed Cassandra. This is what Cain intended for her.

And Barbara cannot help but feel she’s throwing her back into something she escaped.

Isn’t it all the same, having her here, helping with Oracle, living in a Shatterdome? Isn’t it encouraging her the same way Cain tried to engineer her?

When their gazes meet again, Cassandra clasps her hands together and pleads with her eyes.

For better or worse, Barbara can’t say no to that face.

“All right,” Barbara relents. “All right. You’ll have to slip in close behind me, okay?”

While Barbara removes her glasses for the iris scanner by the door, Cassandra sticks to her like glue, and when the doors slick open, Cassandra follows her inside in a hurry.

In the center of the room, Grace runs through her forms alone. 

Must be waiting for Anissa, who Barbara suspects is being used as a second pair of hands. Back at the Academy, Barbara briefly considered K-science. After taking an anatomy elective, however, she soon determined that cutting apart kaiju guts wasn’t as glamorous as it was made out to be.

“Cassandra wanted a look at the combat room,” Barbara explains in response to Grace’s questioning look.

Grace leans on her staff and grins at Cass. “Catch.” She tosses the staff to her.

Catching the staff without blinking, Cassandra flourishes it, falling into a ready stance opposite her.

“Oh, she thinks she’s got it.” Grace crosses tattooed arms over her chest.

Cassandra lifts one shoulder: she senses the challenge and meets it with sweetness. Twirling the staff, she tips it forward to tap Grace’s collarbone.

“Might be biting off more than you can chew,” Grace warns her.

Chin in palm, Barbara watches them. “I think _you_ might be.” She’ll trash-talk on Cassandra’s behalf.

Grace snorts and swats the end of the staff when it bobs up again. “I’m not fighting you, kiddo.”

Cassandra looks back at Barbara, who shrugs. Pointing to her ring finger, Cassandra indicates the door.

“You want to fight Anissa?” 

In the middle of her fiancee saying her name, Anissa steps through the door. Cassandra must have recognized her tread.

Grace huffs. “She’s tougher than she looks.” With the air of the smitten, she adds, “And she looks pretty tough.”

Anissa pulls her hair into a puff in preparation to spar. “What have I walked in on?”

“Cassandra’s thrown down the gauntlet,” Barbara informs her.

“Oh, come on.” Grace looks between Anissa and Cassandra, who have locked eyes. “I’ll get the mats,” she sighs reluctantly.

Anissa makes the first move. Something easy. 

Used to be Barbara’s copilot’s opener, she remembers. A fakeout.

Before Anissa can lunge in the other direction and trip up Cassandra, Cassandra’s already there. In a blink, she blocks the blow. Anissa starts to pull her elbow back up again, and Cassandra pins it back with the staff straight across her chest.

Breaking the grip, Anissa dances around her. They circle for a second and then from one heartbeat to the next there’s a _thud_ that shakes the floor of the combat room.

“Well,” Anissa says from the floor where she’s sprawled. “I’m glad Grace puts the mats down.” She looks as startled as Barbara feels.

Even Grace’s arms have come down from her chest. She’s reconsidering Cassandra, it seems. 

“What did I say?” Barbara studies her nails smugly.

“Guess I’ll...play the winner,” Grace announces.

Anissa gets to her feet and dusts herself off. “Good luck kiss?” 

The idea makes Grace scoff, but she offers her cheek anyway to accept the peck. Rubbing her hands together, Grace picks up Anissa’s discarded staff and whirls it once. Then she plants herself in front of Cassandra and nods the go-ahead.

Cassandra just smiles.

This time her staff moves so fast Barbara can’t see it, can only feel the breeze.

Grace jumps back and Cassandra turns and before anyone but Cassandra really knows what’s happening, Grace is flat on her face, gasping.

“You’re kidding me,” Grace mumbles into the mat.

“Yeah, eat plastic, Choi. See how it feels,” Anissa taunts.

Grace groans. “You’re enjoying this,” she accuses.

Planting her foot on Grace’s butt, Anissa laughs. “What makes you think that?” She winks at a bemused Cassandra. “I’m buying you a pizza for that. And stealing a slice because you nearly broke my collarbone.”

“Wanna make that two pizzas?” Barbara rucks back her sleeves and tips her chin up at Cassandra. It’s not an empty offer, either. If they needed any further confirmation of Cassandra’s age, it’s there in how she can make her way through a mountain of food. Here, they’re all glad to see her eat as much as she wants.

Grace gets up in a hurry. “Wait, Barbara, I don’t know--”

Ignoring her, Barbara holds up her forearms, then indicates pressing them to her body. “Pin my arms and you win.”

Barbara and Helena drill self-defense on occasion to keep off the rust, so it hasn’t been _years_ since Barbara’s used the combat room like Grace must be thinking.

No one has tested Barbara’s limits or surpassed her limits or fallen behind her limits the way Barbara herself has. She knows her own limits. 

As Cassandra darts forward, Barbara braces and pushes back against the initial attack. Maybe it’s because she’s seen it twice, or maybe it’s something else, but for a couple seconds, she holds her own. Spins her chair around fast and bucks her off and even makes her step back a pace. 

Watching the other two couldn’t prepare her for how it feels to be taken down by Cassandra.

Without a finger twitch more than necessary, yet with enough deliberation that there’s no dodging it, Cassandra forces Barbara’s arms behind her back.

Barbara grins breathlessly. “Sausage and banana peppers?”

Arm around Anissa, shaking her head, Grace says darkly, “You _knew.”_

Holding up her hands, Barbara shakes her head. “I had a hunch.” Cassandra comes over and leans her elbow on her shoulder, and Barbara ruffles her hair.

Barbara didn’t know. But she knew herself. And she knew Cassandra. 

She knew something about probability, and she knew something about faith.


	4. Shadows

Barbara cranes over the side of the bed to look down at Cassandra’s head, now fuzzy black as her hair grows in slow. “Cassandra, I have to make a call.” She makes a little ringing gesture with her fingers. 

Cassandra has an uneven lexicon, overextended in jargon, sparse in general knowledge and stunted in colloquialisms. She doesn’t really think in conventional word strings. And sometimes someone will speak to her, and she doesn’t respond right away.

But they’re working it out.

Looking up from her sudoku, Cassandra flashes her a thumbs up and then hikes her thumb at the door in question.

She hesitates. She doesn’t want to send Cassandra out when there’s no real need. “Only if I’m too loud.”

Cassandra presses one hand over her ear and flaps the other in imitation of Barbara chattering.

“Brat.” The smile playing around her lips drops off when she looks back at her tablet.

She stares at the black mirror of the screen and lets out a little breath. Steeling herself, she switches it on and props it up level. That much done. It takes an enormous amount of determination for her to tap the name.

“Barbara.” A smile like a smear of oil. “I thought you’d forgotten about me.”

“How could I forget.” Barbara’s mouth stretches awkwardly in return. Not banter. They never managed that, even as copilots.

“I watched your talk. Your funding will be renewed, I’m sure.” Pushing his glasses up his nose, her brother leans forward to peer at her. “My sister, a success.”

Who else but James could make that sound so pejorative? Trying for normalcy--trying not to hang up immediately--she sips her tea and asks, “And you, James?” She makes an abortive motion to push her own glasses up her nose.

Who developed the tic first? She’s older, so he could conceivably have picked it up from her. More disturbing is the idea that they developed it after, from thousands of miles apart, lives that won’t stop paralleling.

That’s what it is about Drifting. Losing the end of oneself in the beginning of someone else.

“The same as ever,” James tells her, indifferent. “I always am. That’s what you always said.”

She always said that.

He had shadows in his head before they started hooking him up to machines and robots and her. Creeping gloom in the corners before got a faceful of Kaiju Blue through the broken dashboard. 

She knows, she _knows_ better than anyone.

“Dad wanted you to try a new medicine, right?” Dad keeps trying and trying, like he can chase out the shadows. Like there’s something that can be fixed.

James believes in the potential of the drugs as little as Barbara does, so there’s not even the hope of a placebo effect. “It’s working as well as they all do.”

As in, not at all. He doesn’t seem down about it; then again, he’s never really wanted them to work.

“That was months ago. You’re only asking now?” Fingers push up the nose of his glasses once more, eyes icy behind them.

Like she’s the one who doesn’t care.

Like she’s the one who climbed out of the wreckage of their Jaeger and didn’t look back, like she’s the one who didn’t come to the bedside or the airport or the hooding ceremony.

Like she’s the one who sneered _Where will you go?_ as if there was no question that wherever it was, she would go alone.

She’s uncomfortable at the accusation anyway because even if James has never felt it, he knows how to wield guilt against other people. “Let me know if there’s progress.”

James’s eyes hold hers, then flick down and linger for a moment too long. Deliberate. Cruel. “Same to you.”

When Barbara started making noise about maybe doing kaiju or Jaeger-related research, sticking around at the Shatterdome, her former colleagues responded positively--on the surface.

_You still have a place here,_ they told her with their mouths. They didn’t tell her with their eyes.

The doctors checking off their clipboards and not looking her in the face. Her father, studying his hands, searching for the words, new worry wrinkling his wrinkled brow.

James, bland and rote, patting her unfeeling knee-- _You’ll never walk again._

The irony of it, James being the only one not to lie.

Before, the misconception of nepotism was something they could both withstand. After all, she and James proved themselves with their sim scores and field successes. In the bleak months post-accident, however, James could bear it, and she could not.

Staying at the L.A. Shatterdome would mean getting handouts, the cripple and the crazy.

Barbara gulps air. “I need to go.”

“You’re taking care of the girl, aren’t you?” James says, snake-fast. “David Cain’s daughter. She’s like us, isn’t she?”

Her hands whiten around the tablet. “She’s nothing like you.”

She stills the shaking of her fingers and shoulders long enough to punch _end call._

When she looks down, Cassandra is watching her.

Standing, she comes to her. 

Barbara lowers her hands all the way from her face as Cassandra stands on her toes and reaches for her face. Delicate fingers on the hinges, she corrects the placement of the glasses on Barbara’s nose.

Place on the floor abandoned, she sits cross-legged on Barbara’s bed instead, close enough that her knee brushes high on Barbara’s side, right around where she starts having feeling again.

Cassandra finishes her puzzle and Barbara, in an effort to distract herself, opens up her recently-received messages from the rest of the Shatterdome.

Through it all, Cassandra doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to say a word. Just having her here is more peaceful than alone, more tender than lonely.

Eventually, Barbara calms. “Thanks, Cassandra,” she says, thick.

Cassandra, whose heart is too big for anything as small as pity. Shaking her head at the gratitude, she gestures around them. She presses a hand to Barbara’s shoulder, then to her own. “Hm.”

Tilting her head to the side, Barbara studies her. Should have realized sooner--it’s not just a fond mimicry of Barbara’s thoughtful humming. She’s trying to say something. “Hm?”

Her brow scrunches as she focuses on shaping her mouth. Then she looks up. Bright-eyed, she breathes, _”Home.”_


	5. Self

_Splat._ Gunk splashes in Barbara’s face. “Ugh!”

“Sorry!” Carrie hurries around with a roll of paper towels.

Grimacing, Barbara wipes down her cheeks and cleans her glasses for good measure. “Is this going to give me cancer?” 

“No more than anything else will,” Carrie assures her earnestly.

“Comforting.” Barbara sighs. “Any progress?”

“Oh, we’re extracting all kinds of samples. Tons of data, tons.” Carrie gestures to the wall of scans behind her as well as the array of tubes and dishes filled with tissue slices and microbiome samples. “Cassandra’s a big help.”

Pushing her goggles up into her sweat-spiked hair, Cassandra waves a gloved hand at Barbara and then gestures her to come see. The black and blue goop spattering her head to foot has not dampened her enthusiasm in the least.

Barbara maneuvers around the rolling table and peers down to see a cluster of stained cells through the microscope. “Neat.” Carrie’s publishing all kinds of stuff lately, some of which has gone over Barbara’s head despite her best efforts to keep pace. When she pulls her head back from the microscope, she sighs again at Cassandra. “You’re a mess.”

Cassandra looks down at herself, doubtful. Shrugs.

“You’re going to run out of clothes you can borrow before Carrie can take you on a shopping trip,” Barbara warns, “and you can’t go around naked.”

“I support her nudist philosophy,” Carrie chimes.

Barbara levels a stern look at her. “Don’t encourage her.” 

Strategically, Carrie busies herself with her microscope.

Barbara tugs at the one clean inch of Cassandra’s shirt. “Let’s head back to our room--you can shower while I go pick up the takeout I ordered. And then we can figure out what’s left for you to wear. Good?”

Cassandra strips off her gloves and bobs her head yes.

“Shopping trip! Soon!” Carrie insists out the door.

 

“We can eat first,” Barbara assures her when Cassandra picks up her practice cards.

She’s been drilling with them diligently, daily. Cassandra has been stricter in sticking to her schedule than Barbara has been in enforcing it.

While Cassandra shuffles the cards, Barbara goes ahead and pops open the paper container of noodles, hoping to tempt her.

Still, Cassandra picks up the first. “Jae-ger,” she pronounces with confidence.

“Are you sure you shuffled them?” Barbara pokes her head into the biodegradable plastic bag (with what plagues their oceans today, the world at large has learned a lesson about keeping them as clean as they can control). “Damn, they didn’t include a fork.”

It’s with disdain that Cassandra watches her root for the fork. Picking up the cheap wooden chopsticks they _did_ include, Cassandra indicates them with her chin.

“I’m bad with chopsticks,” Barbara protests.

Incredulous, she reaches over to take Barbara’s container of noodles in her hand and then steal a huge mouthful of them. Stuffing her mouth, she gestures to her;

Reflexively, Barbara reprimands, “Don’t talk with your mouth full.”

Once she chews and swallows, she gestures again.

Sighing, Barbara picks up the other pair of chopsticks. She’s about to go for it without breaking them apart, thinking if the chopsticks are stuck together, their physics will be like forceps. Cassandra’s shake of the head preempts her easy way out. 

Chopsticks split apart, Barbara tries to get a piece of chicken sitting on top of the noodles. Halfway to her mouth, it drops onto the counter with a _plop._ Sauce splashes onto her shirt.

She _just_ showered.

Cassandra giggles. Her laugh always amazes Barbara--with all the hurt she must hold inside her, there is still room and room again for joy.

“Guess you’re not as impressed by me anymore, huh?” Barbara comments, self-deprecating.

After considering her for a moment, Cassandra waggles her hand side-to-side.

Barbara snorts. “Thanks, Cassandra. Glad I have you in my corner.” She forages for a fork in the detritus of napkins on top of the microwave that she really needs to clear.

While they wolf down her noodles, Cassandra reshuffles her cards and tries them out again. She holds up MONKEY and scratches her armpits, ooh-ooh-aahing.

“Monkey,” Barbara says.

“Mon-key,” Cassandra agrees. Then she holds up RUN. “Roon.”

Barbara corrects, _”Run.”_

Nodding, Cassandra makes jogging arms.

“Do you like to run?” They’re practicing with forming basic sentences.

Cassandra looks thoughtful. “Ye.”

She can’t be sure whether Cassandra can’t finish through the _S_ or she’s been picking up poor diction from Harper. “Yes what?” 

She’s pushing Cassandra. Sometimes Barbara thinks she shouldn’t. But Cassandra’s the one leaping forward, and Barbara’s just trying to stay by her side and not hold her back.

“Yes.” Cassandra takes a deep breath. She seems to struggle with a full sentence. She sets down her chopsticks to free both hands for little motions to help herself.

“You like to run?” Barbara prompts when Cassandra gives a quick shake of the head.

“I--like--” When it comes to fitting pieces together, Cassandra excels, and Barbara doubts she’s any different when it comes to words. That’s not what this block is. “To...roon.”

Barbara high-fives her for that one. “Nice. Progress.”

“Progress,” Cassandra repeats, deep and serious and _completely_ mocking Barbara.

Barbara’s lips twitch. “Let’s keep going?” Questions, not orders, are the way to go. When Cassandra perceives something as an order, she doesn’t resist or freeze up, but even as she executes the task, something more important than ability locks down behind her eyes.

Cassandra makes it through a decent handful of cards. It’s about more than making it through words. Before she speaks, she has to swallow down all her training to obedient silence, a more than physical finding of her voice. Often, she gives game tries before she just gestures.

Then she comes to one that gives her pause. Holds the card in two hands. Holds it up to the light. Lips shape it and then she shakes her head. Fierce--no, fearful.

“Can I see?” Barbara knows what the word is, saw the letters back-lighted by the fluorescent ceiling lamp. She’s just trying to distract her from her distress.

Cassandra turns the card around and looks away, trying for some breaths.

“Cassandra,” Barbara says softly.

 _Cassandra,_ Cain barks at her in a video clip when she can’t flick the switches on a mock Jaeger dashboard fast enough. _Cassandra, you disappoint me. Cassandra, do better._ At the start of every video, he’s the one to introduce her. He smugly intones the last name he gave her after Wu-San’s death. 

She never speaks her own self.

Barbara knows what it is to fight for identity under darkness. Striding across the ocean in a Jaeger freed her. But her own mind would trap her. In her head--in her head with James--in James’s head. Claustrophobic. 

After her injury, days passed without Drifting, and she fought her way out of his black corners. That was a blessing. But then she had to fight her way out from under her own shadow.

It was only when she lifted off the weight of that girl--that girl in all the papers and all the posters, that leggy girl in that sporty ponytail and that black-and-yellow Jaeger suit, that girl she would never be again-- that she found the woman she would become.

“Cassandra,” Barbara murmurs again. If there’s anything, anything she can do so Cassandra doesn’t have to find herself and define herself all on her own, she will.

Brown eyes flick up at her. Shaking her head after a dragging pause, Cassandra gestures _again._

She takes her hands. “Cassandra.”

_Again._

They both know that this is not an exercise of phonetics, but one of courage. Even so, Barbara tries again. “Cass--”

With a raised hand, Cassandra cuts her off. Now she nods to herself a little. She rummages, and she finds a red felt-tip. Pressing the card flat to the table, she draws one thick line.

  
CASS ~~ANDRA~~  


“Ca--” Barbara begins.

Her hand whips up again and Barbara quickly stops.

Cassandra tries, she tries, tongue up for the hard _C._ But she winces, and she stops. One hand drops Barbara’s hand to press over her heart, which must be racing.

Barbara gives her a minute and then nudges her stir-fried beef closer. “Why don’t you finish eating before it gets cold?” Damn, Barbara’s turning into Dad, isn’t she.

Spirits dimmed, Cassandra takes smaller bites. Soon she slows and sets down the chopsticks. As she tucks the paper tab of her takeout container into its slot with more care than anybody else has probably ever taken, she mouths something to herself. 

She mouths her name.

Barbara’s chest aches. They’re going to get this. No matter how many days it takes, they’re going to give this back to her.

Collecting Cassandra’s leftovers, Barbara squeezes her shoulder as she passes by to stick the half-empty container in her mini fridge. 

Living in a Shatterdome is like living in a dorm again. Though admittedly she prefers Cassandra to her various snoring, partying undergrad roommates and of course, to James, who she would wake to see staring unblinking at the ceiling.

She hears a tap on the table. A tap again. Turning, Barbara catches sight of her holding up the card with her name, back to her.

Before Barbara can come around the table, Cassandra stops her with her hand on her wrist. Easier to face it while looking away, then. Barbara remembers conversations with James like that.

“What’s your name?” Barbara whispers. “My name is Barbara.”

“Barbara.” She holds her name on her tongue like a petal. Then she winds her fingers through Barbara’s. Lifting her chin, she looks her right in the eye. And she says, and she says, “My--my name--is...Cass.”

“Hey, Cass.” Barbara smiles back at her, wide and warm, and Cass mirrors it. “Finish your noodles.”

 

Nostalgia paints her blind when she steps into the simulation control room.

It’s not quite like L.A.; the sim room where she trained was bigger, better-furnished.

L.A., where she left it all behind. Her father. Her copilot. Her family.

L.A., where her father is still Marshal, and where they’ve long since replenished their Strike Force.

As soon as she knew she couldn’t leave the fight and let kaiju be millions’ more people’s nightmares, she’d considered not leaving L.A. at all. She thought about applying for grad schools in California and pursuing her research at the Shatterdome that had become her home.

Closing her eyes, she breathes in, breathes out, like her therapist taught her to do when the images threatened to drown her.

Grace waits calmly and then beckons her over.

Pressing the comm, Barbara says into it, “So what did you want to show me, Cassandra?”

No response.

“Do you have a vidscreen?” she asks Grace.

“She didn’t seem to need it before,” Grace says, frowning, but she reaches for the appropriate button.

“What are you going to show me?” Barbara lets her smile speak for itself.

Cassandra smiles back and rolls her shoulders, tipping her head from side to side. Then she slides her hands into the virtual controls and squares up.

“Wait. Where’s the copilot?” Barbara demands.

“I made some modifications. Turned it off,” Grace explains, not looking up.

Grace has lost her mind. After what happened with David Cain, after the fear and pain Cass went through, not to mention the whole reason they invented Drifting, to share the load between two brains, how can she even indulge the unheard-of idea of solo piloting? Sim or not, real brain damage is still possible from the neural helmet. “What? Are you crazy?” 

“Just watch.”

Barbara’s muscles tenses up, and she’s this close to lunging after Grace and punching the button off.

But something--something holds her still.

The look in Cass’s eyes, quiet and steely. Grace’s poise beside her. She doesn’t know what it is, but it’s something.

Barbara watches.

That delay where Cassandra doesn’t react right away to speech, like an audio-video lag, melts away as soon as she’s in the sim-Jaeger.

“That’s it. Left,” Grace coaxes.

While Cassandra doesn’t seem to need the direction, she takes it from Grace, flowing seamless from one move to another, crossing virtual terrain and swimming computerized seas like it’s her day job.

She racks up points like crazy.

To say it is like looking in a mirror would be oversimplifying. Barbara was talented, yes, but she had none of Cassandra’s kinetic brilliance. She was a smart Ranger, never a step behind, sure. Cassandra, though, is five steps ahead.

“Punch under that big ugly jaw--yes!” Grace cheers, pumping her fist.

Without taking a blow, Cassandra goes right for the kaiju’s vulnerable spots.

No _wonder_ Cassandra could design that program for Oracle. What she knows is so much more than theory.

A blur of motion, she hits and kicks and punches and headbutts. It’s capoeira, it’s krav, it’s taekwondo. She’s Sandra Wu-San at ISKA World 2007. She doesn’t have to touch the gun, the sword, or any of the sim-Jaeger’s auxiliary weaponry.

She is the weapon.

The sim times out with a metallic chime.

Cassandra’s chest rises and falls fast. 

She usually slips out of their room early in the morning to the gym to work out. Barbara just didn’t realize how hard she must have been working to hold onto everything her father had forced into her brain.

Cain, cracked in the head and cruel as he was, had done it. In Cassandra, he had created the culmination of the K-Renaissance.

In an ideal world, Cassandra would be removed from what was essentially the root of her trauma.

She would lead an ordinary life where she only saw Shatterdomes when her foster parents didn’t flip news channels fast enough. She’d indulge in martial arts as an intramural _maybe_ , and she would buy glossy girl band spreads for the walls of a room of her own in a house in the suburbs.

In an ideal world, Cassandra Cain as she is would have never come to be.

In an ideal world, Barbara Gordon would have never stopped walking, but she would have never started flying.

“That was off the wall!” Grace yells down the comm.

Cassandra’s breathing is even. Calm. Nothing like she was in the lab with her father.

Hastily toggling on the video screen, Barbara flashes her two thumbs up. She’s not sure she would trust her words right now anyway.

Because even the girl with two months’ experience of mainstream culture has to be cooler than Barbara, Cassandra snorts and goes for a one-sided fist bump with the air instead.


	6. Faith

Flicking through the Oracle screencaps on Barbara’s tablet, Helena tells her, “Yeah. It’s impeccable work, Barbara. It always is.”

Barbara smiles, self-effacing. “Cass has been invaluable in the process. She’s a great help.”

“I’m hearing a lot of that lately. From all over the Shatterdome.” Helena laces her fingers under her chin, and Barbara _knows_ the exact moment she sees through her. “This meeting isn’t really about Oracle, is it.”

For as long as Barbara has worked at the Icebox, Oracle has been everything to her. Her reason to burn the midnight oil and to rise with the sun. Oracle is about saving pilots, about saving citizens. Oracle is about saving herself.

When Barbara began again, she started with nothing but what she could dream, and then she had the program, and it was more than she could have ever dreamed. She could no longer climb into a Jaeger cockpit, she woke up screaming from phantom pains and flashbacks and premonitions, but none of that mattered if she could do this one thing. So Barbara pushed it all away and poured herself into her work.

But--she pushed it _all_ away.

The members of the Anchorage Shatterdome crew were her teammates, not her friends. She rarely called L.A. She didn’t go out for drinks. She didn’t _go out._ Harper told her, _It was_ you, _Doctor Gordon,_ but until three months ago, she hadn’t thought about inspiring anybody beyond inspiring herself to get out of bed every morning for a very long time.

“It’s about Cass.” Barbara leans forward, folding her hands on the table as well. “Look, Helena, I know we’ve talked about this...”

“We have.” Helena’s expression does not change. “And you know what I think about allowing a child to engage in dangerous work that others have signed on with the approval of an international body and trained institutionally to do.”

Barbara does know what she thinks. She and Helena have a kinship of sorts, being the two oldest working here. And Barbara was raised by a father with thought processes just as linear, so she can understand where she’s coming from: they had to follow the rules to reach where they were, especially Helena, who couldn’t put a toe out of line. Who had to play the game and play it harder than anybody because of her age and her skin and her gender.

Barbara’s father and Helena come from a place of procedure, of protocol, of _precedence._

But precedence, Barbara has felt since she started this journey at the Academy, has no precedence when alien monsters rip their way through the Earth’s crust, and they march out robots to punch them in the face.

“Here’s the thing, though.” Barbara has to deliver this straight-faced because she knows and accepts that she is screwed. “She’s already been doing these things.”

“I know she helped Carrie with her dissection.” Helena’s mouth pinches. “I’m going to confiscate those steampunk goggles of Carrie’s and replace them with real PPE. Let me guess, Cass wasn’t wearing anything that would actually protect her from biohazardous material, either.”

Although Barbara agrees, she’s not going to give her more material right now. “Come on, Helena. You’re really going to throw Carrie under the bus?”

“Oh, I know it’s not just Carrie.” Helena points at her. “I know you let her into the combat room. I know both Anissa and Grace agreed to fight a _sixteen year old.”_

Barbara shakes her head. “It’s not like that.”

“It’s not like that?” Helena demands. “It’s not like you’re taking a girl who’s been traumatized by all these things and taking advantage of everything her father forced her to be?”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve thought about it like that.” Swallowing, she looks down at the fake wood grain of the table. “But it’s different. She’s choosing this--the work she’s doing is giving her a purpose.”

Helena asks her evenly, “Are you projecting?”.

That gives her pause. Almost sends her on the defensive. “She’s not me,” she responds as levelly as she can.

“But you see yourself in her.”

“And you saw yourself in me. Is that always such a bad thing?”

Leaning back in her chair, Helena looks to the side. “Leslie has reported that her numbers have improved across the board. At this time, she doesn’t see the need to send her to a specialist. Apparently, she’s doing well at the Shatterdome.”

Barbara’s exasperated. That’s exactly what she’s been saying. And she’s seen for herself how Cass holds herself straighter, how she smiles more. How she sleeps more peacefully and eats more heartily, expresses herself more readily. She’s changed. She’s changed for the better.

“But if I see something wrong, I _will_ send her to her aunt,” Helena says firmly.

Her family is _here,_ Barbara wants to tell her. The people who care about her are _here._ She says, “Of course.”

“That’s all I’ll say for now. She can...carry on helping Carrie and exercising in the training room.”

Bullet dodged. Barbara sighs.

“One caveat.” Helena crosses her arms across her chest. “I want her to be kept out of the sim room.”

Barbara is silent a moment too long. 

“Gordon,” Helena barks. “You think it’s a good idea to let her near anything neural after what happened to her father?”

“She let herself into the room.” Barbara questioned Grace--she wasn’t willing to let Cass fight with staffs and mats, but she was fine with letting her simulate Jaeger battle? Grace explained that Cassandra hacked her way into the room, and by the time Grace had found her, she’d finished running through five of the most difficult sims, so she figured it was a lost cause and went from there.

Helena’s expression darkens. “You expect me to believe that? The security on that place is tight.”

“I can show you the footage.” She understands her disbelief, as she’d demanded to see it herself. 

“Send it to me.” Jaw tight, Helena shakes her head. “I don’t want her or anyone else getting hurt. This stops now. I’ll slap you, Choi, and Pierce with disciplinary notices if I see any hint otherwise.”

Damn. Damn, damn. “At least give her a chance. Observe her.” Barbara leans forward a little, gripping at the table between them to keep balance in her chair. “If not the sim room, the combat room.”

“I’m not feeling very permissive right now,” Helena says with--again, understandable--severity.

Last shot. Barbara’s brows draw together. “You need to see what she can do.” 

Unmoved, Helena stares back at her. “You knew how this was going to go from the start.”

She holds her gaze with determination. “Let me change your mind,” she challenges her.

Helena’s eyes _spark,_ and then Barbara knows she has her. “Combat room. One round. Mats down, safety equipment on, and I’ll call it off if I see anything wrong. I want Leslie to evaluate her before and afterwards.”

This is it. Barbara grabs onto her faith, in Cass and in Helena. She nods. 

 

_“Is she good to go?” Helena asks Leslie._

_Leslie shows her the readings, and Cass in turn gives her a nod from the biobed. “And we had a session before this where we discussed it.”_

_“So you know. One round with mats and safety equipment, and if I need to end it for any reason, I will.” Helena holds Cass’s eyes seriously._

_Hopping down, Cass gives her a firm handshake._

_Helena’s frowning anyway as she follows Cass into the combat room._

_Helena and Cass bow to each other, brief. Their expressions now would seem laughably solemn if not for all that rides on this for Cass’s future, and how worried Helena must be._

_Helena catches Cass’s quick blows and drives her backwards on the mats. For a moment, it looks iffy for Cass as she’s driven back against the wall._

_Cass swoops under her arm, gives this _textbook_ high kick. Helena catches her shin. Cass twists them onto the floor. When they leap back up, Cass goes offensive, Helena parries. _

_Helena’s expression visibly contorts. All of a sudden she stops treating Cass like she’s delicate. She really goes for it._

_Thirty seconds._

_Helena on her side on the floor. Gasping like a fish._

_“I know I said one match…”_

“That’s enough of that.” Helena hurriedly shuts off the security footage. She runs a hand through her hair and exhales. “I didn’t see that coming.”

Barbara mentally fist-bumps Cass. “I did,” Barbara can’t help but say.

Helena glares. Right. Too far. “You’ll be pleased to know that her psychological and physiological results post-exercise were solid.”

It’s just confirmation of what Barbara already knows, but all the same, a little empirical evidence does soothe the soul. “That’s great.” Her mouth curves. “So why’d you cut off the tape?”

Helena arches an imperious eyebrow and declines to answer.

“So what does that mean for Cass?” Barbara asks. “You saw her skill. Her coordination. That stuff--that’s _rare._ That’s valuable. And she’s happy doing it.”

“Do you ever wonder how much of that is from what her father did and how much of it is from what her mother gave her?” Helena asks with a kind of bittersweetness.

Helena, too, idolized Sandra Wu-San, Barbara knows. “Only every day.”

They sit in silence for a few moments. Barbara’s still burning up with questions. Helena’s thinking, though, and she’d be a fool to not let a good thing take its own course. 

“I’m sorry.”

 _No._ After all this? “Helena, please--”

“No.” Helena stands. “She’s free to use any of the training equipment, and I don’t mind if she spars with any of you. She can help out in LOCCENT or the labs as long as she’s being supervised. But I cannot conscionably allow her to do anything involving Jaegers or Drifting. The safety of non-personnel is a PPDC priority.”

Barbara’s hands curl around her arm-rests, but she says nothing. 

“Do you understand?” Her tone is strict, yet her eyes carry sympathy.

Unable to bear even the hint of condescension from her, Barbara fights not to look away. “I understand. Cass’s safety is my priority. Marshal.”

 

Oracle’s glowing green grid is beginning to blur before Barbara’s eyes. For hours they’ve been in LOCCENT, trying to fix a blind spot in the system. If they can’t fix it from here, they’re going to have to send out Amazon Thunder.

Cass shakes her shoulder. It shatters her stupor.

Lifting her head, she looks at her, then gestures to the square. “Nothing’s changed.”

With a sigh, Cass plants both hands on her shoulders and swivels her around to look at the screen to the left instead.

“Oh. Oh god. What is that?” Hurriedly, Barbara zooms in closer. When she looks at the readings, they’re pinging off the charts. Activity is bubbling up fast, and Oracle can barely record all of it.

When her head swings around to Cass, she sees the same urgency she feels in her expression.

Cass throws the switch.

 

Harper pats Amazon Thunder’s side and seems satisfied by the hollowed clank. “Ready, you two?”

Grace looks over at Anissa and grins from behind the clear face of her helmet. “Ready.”

“Break a leg!” Harper calls.

Cass’s eyes are wide and dazzled when she and Barbara move back to watch for a moment, the light glancing off the Jaeger striping her cheeks in color.

“C’mon. LOCCENT,” Barbara says more briskly than she means. She stops herself. While Cass would be helpful and this is an all-hands-on-deck moment, this isn’t Cass’s _job._ She isn’t obliged to do anything. Just as she’s opening her mouth to say so, Cass runs past her towards LOCCENT. 

She’s a streak of energy, almost skidding as she rounds the corner, and Barbara should have never doubted her.

Hands on her wheels, she follows behind at a clip.

They monitor Amazon Thunder’s progress across the seabed as well as the spiking activity. “You’ll be seeing an emergence in less than five minutes.”

“How much less than five minutes?” Grace calls, muffled.

Cass pulls the cursor and flicks the countdown over their heads-up displays.

“I’ll start powering up the weapons,” Anissa mutters. Big guns get revved up, lights popping up on the dashboard that mirrors Amazon Thunder’s.

Barbara tries not to be a backseat driver, but she can’t help herself. “Don’t plant yourself in the seabed like that.” 

“We don’t want to be blown off our feet,” Anissa says slowly, though she peels one foot of the Jaeger out of the silt.

“You don’t want to be stuck ankle-deep with a kaiju breathing down your neck, either,” Barbara replies with stony resolve.

“Think she’s right, babe.” Grace flicks a couple switches so that Amazon Thunder now floats in place. 

Over their voices, they can hear the low hum of the nuclear engine, and when the Jaeger bobs higher, the crash of waves over the dome. It’s a drawn-out stillness, everyone tense, everyone waiting.

Grace mutters, “I don’t like this.”

“What’s going on with the activity? Anything on the sensors?” Anissa questions.

Barbara leans into the mic again. “Activity’s decreasing, actually.”

Behind her, Cass paces back and forth, chin in hand. She knows Oracle’s patterns, she’s studied recordings of previous attacks, and she knows something’s up just as well as Barbara does.

Helena lets herself into the room and closes the door as quietly as she can. Harper has to be in the bay for now in case the Jaeger sustains damage or anything has to be shipped in emergency-wise. No doubt she’s over there biting her nails, too. Carrie, meanwhile, isn’t authorized to enter LOCCENT.

Cass points to a corner of the screen, and Barbara hurriedly adjusts the calibration. “Pivot the Jaeger left. Kaiju emerging _now._ Cat IV.” Unfortunately, just as dangerous a kaiju as she and Cass predicted. Hopefully their prediction that it will be just the one holds accurate, too.

“What a lovely day to take down a Cat IV!” Anissa begins rotating her own side, and Grace effortlessly coordinates until the Jaeger faces down the kaiju, guns mounted on shoulders and fists balled in anticipation.

Not that Barbara has ever seen a kaiju she’d call pretty, but this one’s an ugly bastard. The water and shadow where the Jaeger’s lights don’t reach somewhat distort its features, but on the Shatterdome end, they can still make out flared nostrils, spikes. Wide mouth opening. 

_Whoosh._ Hot, bubbling water jets from his mouth, collides with the side of the Jaeger.

Jaeger rocking, they lose a clear camera image for a few minutes.

“Melted the goddamn metal!” Grace shouts down the line, jerking the Jaeger out of the way as the kaiju issues forth another boiling stream. 

Their combined efforts rocket the Jaeger up to the ocean’s surface. As the kaiju fights its way to the surface after them, huge swells send them eddying along, closer to shore.

“We need backup.” Grace is moving the controls as fast as her hands can go. It isn’t enough. And backup isn’t coming. Amazon Thunder is the Icebox’s whole Strike Force, and no other coastal city can send out a Jaeger in time.

Just after Barbara and James had dealt the killing blow to the kaiju, just before their own death knell sounded, they were rescued. But Grace and Anissa are on their own.

Anissa grunts. “Gotta go back the other way--” 

Like a vision of the apocalypse, the kaiju’s head rises out of the frothing black behind them.

“Turn around!” Helena almost screams, usual composure evaporated. “Turn around!”

They can’t swing around fast enough. Viciously sharp teeth, made of an unearthly material physicists are still puzzling over, clamp onto Amazon Thunder’s head. The kaiju shakes the Jaeger like a dog, and they can hear Grace and Anissa’s yells from inside the cockpit.

Barbara’s fingers shake as she pulls her cardigan closed across her chest. She remembers: her own screams made disembodied by her terror, James’s spectral white face, lips a pink line like a scar. How they jostled against each other. James’s head thumping into the side of the Jaeger, the kaiju’s clawed hand closing around--

One lean arm winds around Barbara’s shoulders and Cass says softly, “Kick.”

The need more than anything pulls Barbara’s voice from her chest back into the mouth. It’s too quiet. They can’t have heard that. “Kick!” Barbara shouts. “Swivel the leg around, kick!”

Silence from the cockpit.

“Pierce!” Helena shouts. “Choi? Anissa! Grace! Come in. Do you copy?”

Nothing.

Frantically, Cass toggles the screen to display the secondary cockpit cam. Though Grace and Anissa are being shaken around, teeth clenched, neither have passed out. Behind them, Helena sighs audibly. 

Onscreen now they see Grace’s mouth moving, Anissa’s lips stretched wide with the volume of her voice. They hear nothing.

“No more audio input.” Barbara flicks every switch she can think of and still nothing. “And who knows if they’re getting our output?”

Then comes Cass’s tap. Barbara’s so tense it’s a wonder she doesn’t shoulder her off. When she turns to look, Cass points at herself. “What?” She looks away from her, then to the cockpit cam, where Grace and Anissa have slumped, teeth gritted as the kaiju carries its prize in its teeth, ever closer to shore. Shit. 

She looks back at Cass. _Hoping._

Cass claps a hand over her mouth, then both over her ears. Like a game of charades on fast-forward, she runs quickly through a number of gestures. Lunging over to the dashboard, Cass jabs a button Barbara hasn’t yet tried.

“The _video_ feed. They might still be able to receive it in their helmets.” Barbara adjusts it.

Her end says that the wide pan of LOCCENT has been broadcasted successfully. On their ends, she can see tiny reflections of the anxiously-assembled crew in Grace and Anissa’s eyes.

When Cass leaps in front of the screens, Barbara hesitates for just a split second before she backs up and allows her to take up most of the view.

 _Cass?_ she can see Anissa mouth.

With a vigorous nod, Cass mimes a backwards kick.

Anissa’s eyes widen. Quickly, she turns to Grace and with their combined efforts, they kick out, one of the Jaeger’s heels digging right into the kaiju eye. Pained, the kaiju opens its mouth, and the Jaeger falls out.

When Barbara stared down the kaiju, fear paralyzed her. She remembers fumbling at the controls, needing to be shaken out of it by barked orders. Only then could she and James take control of the Jaeger again and turn the battle in their favor. So she gets why Grace and Anissa are looking to Cass, who is distanced from the situation, cool and clear-headed.

Cass spins, and Grace and Anissa roll the Jaeger, evidently managing to land feet-first in the ocean again by the twin splashes they see. Watching closely, Cass runs a half-circle. 

Amazon Thunder lumbers around the kaiju, its grey hide visible through the secondary cockpit cam. Their view shakes up a little as they adjust on the ocean floor again.

Joining her fists, Cass brings them smashing down.

“Power it up,” Helena tells Barbara, and Barbara hits the button to rev up the charge in the Jaeger’s hands.

Amazon Thunder delivers a fully-electrified blow to the kaiju’s spine. The kaiju’s body judders with the impact in the cockpit cameras. 

When the Jaeger yanks her fists free, the kaiju collapses in the water.

LOCCENT goes silent.

“Grace? Anissa?” Helena tries again. They see Anissa pulling her hands free and reaching over, fiddling with something. And then the room fills with the sound of their pilots again. “Are you both all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, we are.” Grace grabs Anissa’s hands and squeezes. Her thumb finds her ring, and she grins wide at the camera. “Oh god. We are.”

“Near thing, though. Until her hands go white, Anissa squeezes Grace’s hands back. “Thank you, Cass.”

Grace shakes her head. “Man, Cass…”

Modestly, Cass folds her hands behind her back and shrugs.

“Start heading back,” Helena tells them, clearly shaken by the proceedings, staying as iron-jawed as she can. When she looks away from the screen, she looks back at Cass. It seems she’s _trying_ not to look at Barbara’s grin. 

“Really? That’s all you have to say, chief?” Grace huffs, amused.

Helena’s eyes flick to Cass again. “I’m--stunned,” she admits.

“You’re _stunned?”_ Grace repeats. “Really?”

Barbara slaps a hand against her mouth so she doesn’t laugh out loud. Cass, who has no such qualms, breaks out into sweet peals of laughter. Breaks all the lingering tension. Helena fights back a smile, too.

It’s with a world-weary sigh that Anissa announces, “I hate you guys.”

 

Cass, zipping herself up, looks to Helena one last time.

“Go on,” Helena says. She sighs and ruffles Cass’s spiky hair. “I’m not going to change my mind.”

Ducking her head on a smile, Cass adjusts her suit and then steps into the sim. As soon as she gets inside, she starts adjusting, looking confident, looking happy. 

Is this what’s best for Cass? Barbara has always had her doubts, and she knows Helena still has hers. Cass has no such qualms.

In the Jaeger bay after Amazon Thunder’s return, Barbara pulled Cass away from the rejoicing throng and clasped her hand. “It’s your choice, Cass. Forget--everything else. What is it _you_ really want to do?” she asked, and Cass pointed to the left of Amazon Thunder, where all tied up in metal struts, empty and _waiting,_ born right out of Harper’s sketches, was a small black Jaeger.

Arm crossed over her chest, hand on her face, Helena watches her. “Safety precautions are in place?”

“Safety precautions in place,” Grace confirms. “Are you going to let me do my job?”

“Ranger,” Helena growls in warning, but she does back off. 

Grace throws off a salute and then powers up the sim. 

This is an _old_ program. A legend of Barbara’s time. Back in her own Academy days, this sim wiped out every intrepid student who tried to beat it.

A couple veterans of the sim told James that his disaffected demeanor would be a great help. Maybe it was, but a level head could only go so far, and it overpowered their skill threshold as much as it did anyone else’s. At least the humiliation was one shared with many.

“You remember this one?” Barbara glances at Helena, a small smile at the corner of her mouth. 

Helena nods in affirmation, brows drawn together.

She pauses. “Did you beat it?”

An askance glance. “No, I didn’t,” Helena grouches. “Did you?”

Barbara can only smirk. “Nah. Do you think Cass will?”

Eyes on the sim as Cass begins to march the Jaeger out from port, Helena scoffs. With her PR training befitting a world stage, she says diplomatically, “I’m not prepared to comment on that at this time.” Helena leans forward. “Okay,” she says heavily. “Turn off copilot.”

This kaiju moves fast. Thinks fast. The program was the peak of J-Tech and K-Science when it premiered, and it still holds up to this day.

Cass is four steps ahead. Not afraid to take risks. As the kaiju heads for shore, instead of trying to be a physical blockade or fight it back into the ocean, she _chases_ up against the rocks. Barbara would call it a miracle, but she knows Cass is more than a miracle when she avoids even one in-sim human casualty. She takes the kaiju down in the sim, glorious graphics, a technicolor bloodbath.

“See?” Barbara’s mouth curves, and when Cass waves, she wiggles her fingers back. “She’s good.”

Helena shakes her head. 

What does Cass have to do, repeat it all again upside down, spinning plates? “Didn’t she exceed your expectations?”

“She’s not ‘good.’ Not ‘better than expected.’” Helena looks back at her, and Barbara’s taken aback to see in her eyes what she was looking for all along. Faith. “She’s perfect.”


	7. Flight

“Do they seriously not believe--mmph--you?” The wrench stuck between her teeth muffles Harper’s words.

When Barbara wiggles her fingers, Harper hands it over sheepishly. Holding it delicately by the dry end, Barbara shakes her head. “They don’t. It’s not even a matter of blind faith. The numbers are there. Readings say it all. We’re about to see the emergence of the first Cat Vs.” 

She and Cass pored over the numbers before Barbara presented them to an audience of LOCCENT-operating colleagues and the world’s best K-science mathematicians. She’d sent them the Oracle files, and they’d replied back saying that with the very real threats they were dealing with daily already, they didn’t have time to deal with _theory._ There was an equally resounding silence from PPDC leadership. 

“Well, damn, when have you ever heard of people seeing facts right in front of their face and ignoring them?” Harper shakes her head. “Some people still think K-Day was staged by the government and kaiju are animatronic...”

Barbara snorts. “Yeah, it’s nice to be insulated from all that here.”

Vindictively, Barbara thinks that it wasn’t so much that PPDC doesn’t _believe_ her as that they don’t _want_ to believe her. No one wants to believe in the coming of stronger and smarter kaiju, kaiju they aren’t prepared to fight. Neither does Barbara. 

But reality is something to face head-on; it is a collision course anyway. She remembers what Sandra Wu-San told her-- _if you’re onto something, don’t let it go._

If no other Shatterdome is going to get ready, if the rest of the PPDC is going to abandon their Anchorage outpost as they so often do, the Icebox still won’t abandon the world.

Even as Barbara fumes inwardly, her eyes keep drifting to the side. To the elephant in the room. “She’s nearly finished, isn’t she.” She lays a hand on the side of the small black Jaeger, craning her neck back to admire its exquisite construction.

“Yeah. Just, uh. Gotta finish up some of the detailing.” Harper pats her flank. “What do you think?” she asks, endearingly nervous.

“I think the Cat Vs are coming, and she needs to be there to greet them.” Reaching for the lever sticking up from the struts, Barbara pops the top. “I think she has an extra seat.”

Harper stares at Barbara, then at the Jaeger. She twirls a wrench on her finger. “I think...you’re right.” Cranking the lever, she lowers the Jaeger, then climbs up onto the platform beside it with her heavy boots. She sweeps her long blue hair back in a ponytail, rolls up the sleeves of her jacket, and gets back to work. “Good thing taking shit out is easier than putting it in.”

“That’s a lot of wiring you’re undoing,” Barbara says. And maybe for nothing. One-seated, this Jaeger will be rendered useless for anyone but Cass, and Cass might not be allowed to pilot it.

When Harper looks over at her and shrugs, she knows she realizes it might be for nothing, too. “I’ve had to do worse.”

“This is off the books.” Barbara wheels closer and hands her a pair of pliers, then clippers.

“Yeah, you don’t have to tell me that,” Harper says, echoing from inside the metal shell of the Jaeger.

“What I mean is--right now, any fallout that’s going to come from this is going to be on your shoulders.” Although crazy talented, Harper is junior, and the consequences will come down _hard_ on her. Barbara can’t let that happen. “I’m going to give you documentation of my involvement.” As the most senior PPDC employee, the responsibility will fall to her first.

“I--I don’t know, Doctor Gordon.” Pulling her head out, Harper clutches the edges of the Jaeger’s hull. “I--that’s _big_.”

“ _This_ is big,” Barbara tells her firmly. “This is bigger than me, and this is bigger than you. It’s not even about Cass. It’s about the dream you had as a girl, the way you wanted to change the world when you looked at the posters on your wall.” She shrugs, grins. “What better way to go down than saving the world?”

Harper’s eyes are about to pop out of her head. She rubs her shoulders, shivering. “Whoa. Chills.”

Barbara rolls her eyes. “You have a lot of work to do. I’ll let you get back to it.” She sets down the canteen of tea she brought for her on the table. “Let me know if you need anything else, all right?”

The Jaeger’s hull deepens and elongates Harper’s hum of acknowledgement.

 

Face tight and unhappy, Cass shuffles through her word cards. 

“You had a long day.” Barbara’s increasingly seeing them as a source of stress for her. “Maybe you should just pick back up with them tomorrow.”

She rubs the sides of her face and shakes her head. Picks them up again. 

Barbara’s lips pinch together. The voice Cass must be listening to in her head right now is the voice of a man who never loved her. Who never wanted the best for her. In trying to escape his cage, Cass is erecting new walls herself, twisting wire to hold herself in as an idea, not a person. 

_There’s no one you have to be,_ Barbara wants to tell her. Barbara--should tell her that. Half her conversations with Cass don’t leave her own head.

She can hear Cass toss and turn in bed, and Barbara can’t sleep, either, an ugly knot in her stomach. Apropos of nothing, she asks, “Cass, have you thought about learning ASL?”

It takes a moment, but in the little light that comes around the door from the always-illuminated corridor outside, she sees Cass turn over to look at her. She doesn’t say anything.

“You rely so much on body language. You should be able to communicate even when words aren’t easy.” Barbara pauses. “We could learn it together?”

Cass huffs. Lifting her hand, she taps her temple, raises her eyebrows. The sass trips off her tongue easy because of course it does. “...Keep up.”

“You think I couldn’t keep up?” She reaches around and in a fit of pique, chucks her pillow at Cass.

Not missing a beat, Cass snatches the pillow from the air and snuggles it to her chest, blinking at her. 

The only thing that distracts Barbara from the absurd sweetness of it is how Cass shivers slightly. “Cold?” She reaches for her folded spare blanket, threatening to toss that over at her too.

Quickly, Cass shakes her head. 

Barbara frowns. She knows Cass left her favorite (read: Leslie’s former favorite) cardigan in LOCCENT. “At least let me get you a sweater. Shut your eyes.” A snap of her fingers brings the fluorescent lights on the ceiling blaring to life. Getting out of bed and into her chair with a quick twist, Barbara goes over to her closet. “Let’s see…”

There’s a lot of muted-colored outerwear in Barbara’s closet. It’s been a long time since she’s worn skin-tight yellow. Lots of comfortable things. Nevertheless she palms past the thick sweatshirts dangling from plastic hangers. Past the new. Her fingers brush something soft. Worn. Something from who she used to be.

Grabbing a nondescript hunter green pullover as well, she balls both and tosses them over to Cass.

Head coming up a hairsbreadth from the ceiling, Cass sits up fast. Barbara’s never seen her bump or trip or stumble. She’s probably not capable. First, she studies the green pullover. Smooths it down against her sheets, assessing it as critically as she does any diagram. Sliding it aside, she takes a look at the second. And it only takes her a moment to decide.

Barbara catches the green pullover just in time for it not to hit her face. With a snort, she hangs it up in the closet again.

Cass shrugs on Barbara’s sweater. Settle in a little. Trace her fingertips over it. Smiles.

“You think you can sleep now?” Barbara whispers.

Cass’s smile widens, and she gives a vigorous nod.

Regardless of the reassurance, Barbara waits. She waits until Cass slides back under the covers, until her eyes close and her breathing slows. One hand nests like a little bird on her pillow. The other lays loosely over her chest.

Under that hand, she can just barely see it. On a black field, that bold yellow. 

Barbara’s bat.

Once a symbol splashed everywhere. Once hidden away. Now brought out again. 

Now rising and falling with a girl’s dreams again.

 

Seconds after Barbara joins Harper in the bay, Helena strides up to them. “Marshal,” she murmurs. She cuts a glance at Harper, unsure. After Cass fell asleep, she decided to slip out and check on Harper’s progress. She’s not sure what Helena’s doing here at this hour.

“I’m adding my signature to Doctor Gordon’s authorization form,” Helena announces.

“Look, I can’t ask you to do that.” Harper’s alarmed eyes move from Barbara’s to Helena’s. “ _I_ built this Jaeger. _I_ made it one-pilot. I did it all with my own hands.” She shakes her head uneasily. “I’m scared you’re going to get blamed anyway as marshal. And I want to do this for Doctor Gordon and Cass.”

Helena snorts and says, frank, “I am. And so is Doctor Gordon. So we’re going to present a united front and go from there.” She claps Harper’s shoulder hard enough to rock her forward a foot. “Okay?”

Fidgeting with her stylus, Harper sighs. “You got it, Marshal.” She hands over the stylus and tablet to Helena.

After casting a cautious eye at what looks like a bitemark on the end of the stylus, Helena scrawls her no-nonsense signature under Barbara’s. “How much work do you have left to do?” she directs at Harper. To Barbara, she asks, “How much time do we have?”

“Maybe two, three days,” Barbara tells her. “We have to be ready.”

“Well, I gutted the machinery for the copilot and repositioned everything so it’s centered.” Harper wipes her forehead off with a rag and fiddles with her sleeves. Her eyes look puffy. “ _Now_ I just have the detailing left to do. I could finish it before bed.”

Helena doesn’t have time to respond, as her comm chirps. “I have to take this. Good luck, Row. Take breaks if you need to.” She unclips it from her belt and hooks it in her ear as she walks away, irritation clear in her stride but voice is smooth when she answers.

“Aye, aye,” Harper calls after Helena. Looking back at the Jaeger, she traces around her joints and torso, thoughtful. “Not that it’s a paramount concern, but I’m still not sure about the accent color. You want to take a look?” She offers Barbara the tablet once she pulls up the swatches.

After she takes in a breath, it’s barely a moment before she presses and selects a color.

When Harper sees her choice, she hugs the tablet to her chest, fighting back a grin. “You’re serious.”

Barbara doesn’t hold back her smile. “When am I not?” It feels right.

Visibly emboldened, Harper squares up her shoulders. “There’s also the matter of this Jaeger’s call-sign.” And then she grows uncertain again and rushes past her words. “Of course, she doesn’t have to have a call sign, as she’s not exactly going to be registered with the PPDC…I mean, we could just yell ‘Cass!’”

Call signs come from all kinds of places. From the country of origin of the engineer, like Lady Shiva, or from the fanciful invention of the pilots, like Amazon Thunder. There aren’t nearly enough Jaegers for call signs to ever be reused, but the call sign Lady Shiva, Barbara remembers, was officially retired at Wu-San’s memorial service.

Barbara and James’s case is different. Neither sibling is dead. Still, she can’t see the PPDC ever bestowing the name of their old Jaeger onto another. A Jaeger in theory may be simply an advanced piece of military technology, but in reality, it is an extension of the self.

And sometimes it goes beyond the self.

“Can you add the points in the morning?” Barbara asks straightforwardly.

“The points?” When Barbara raises her eyebrows, Harper gasps, eyes flaring with excitement. “The _ears?_ Oh! Yes, I can do them now.”

As gratified as she is by Harper’s excitement, Barbara doesn’t want exhaustion to be the cause of the world’s greatest Jaeger engineer’s death. “In the morning,” she repeats, “and let me help you with the detailing.”

Harper’s already mentally tracing out the ears, Barbara can tell. She can also tell the second she remembers their original conversation and pauses. “But um, her call sign--” 

Barbara will never pilot again. And her old Jaeger will never fly again. But their end was untimely, and maybe it isn’t over yet.

“Black Bat,” Barbara murmurs.

Wordlessly, Harper digs around and then hands her the stencil and paint canister.

“You found that fast.” Barbara unpeels the stencil and then rolls up onto the platform, which rises and carries her to chest-level with the Jaeger. Vertigo takes her for a second before determination overpowers it.

“Sorry. I was hoping.” Once she retrieves another can and shakes it up, Harper drapes the tarp over one arm so she can paint its shoulder-joint.

Barbara laughs. “Never be sorry for hoping.” Pressing the stencil flat to Black Bat’s chest, she sprays in the outline of her beautiful yellow bat.

 

“Fits okay?” Harper frets, hovering around Cass and checking that her nearly pure black Jaeger undersuit fits her appropriately.

Cass rolls her shoulders with a clink, then gives a firm nod. In that familiar gesture that can mean a hundred things, she folds her hands behind her back. Outwardly, at least, she seems calm.

“Uh--” Harper inspects her one last time. “Okay. Up you go.” She begins lowering the platform with a hydraulic hiss to help Cass up.

“Cass,” Barbara calls. “Are you ready?” She adjusts her comm so the mic is close to her lips. So soft the others can’t hear them, she whispers, “Do you still want to do this? No one could ask this of you.”

Cass turns, inclines her head _yes_. A smile breezes over her lips. Then, neglecting the platform, she scales up the side of the Jaeger and slides into it.

“Okay, monkey,” Barbara murmurs. “Okay. Be safe.”

Harper hooks her up to Black Bat, and the top comes down. Cass’s small hands wrap around the controls.

A moment of madness comes over Barbara. She should stop this. Stop this while she still can. Something brushes the back of her head and wired too tight, she jerks back to look over her shoulder. She finds Helena’s fingers tight and white around the handle of her chair. 

“She’ll be fine.” Helena’s hand sends tremors through the aluminum. 

“You don’t know that,” Barbara can’t help but snap, hand over her comm so Cass can’t hear. Though by the look on her face from high above, Cass can read her face just as easily.

Leaving the handle of the chair, Helena lays her hand gently across Barbara’s nape. “We have to believe she will.”

Barbara has to believe.

As Amazon Thunder and Black Bat head out of the Shatterdome in a roar of noise, Barbara uncups her hand from around the comm. Loud enough for everyone to hear, back into professional mode, she says, “Heading back to LOCCENT.” Carrie and Helena flank her on the way out.


	8. Strike

“You see that gas bubble? Kaiju ETA five minutes, Black Bat.” It’s been a tense hour and a half waiting for the Jaegers to get out there, waiting for something to change. 

In the cockpit cam, Cass nods.

The waiting was torture, Barbara remembered. Hovering in the water, not knowing if doom or glory was coming. At the first sign of activity, adrenalin would heat her. And then when she remembered what each little shift meant, what exactly she was going to face, dread would chill her. James would frown over at her, feeling all of it, feeling none of it.

“The toxicity levels are fluctuating,” Carrie reports, reading off another screen. It’s a Cat V, or so Barbara has predicted. An unknown, so they need their resident kaiju expert close at hand for this one. “As expected. But the spikes are exaggerated.”

“Amazon Thunder, you’re in position?” Helena asks into her comm.

“Yeah, we’re good to go out here,” Anissa agrees gamely. The taller, heavier Amazon Thunder will guard the shore from the kaiju’s charge, while smaller, lighter Black Bat will chase the kaiju straight into the other Jaeger’s arms with the help of her streamlined wings. “Party started yet?”

“Never without you,” Barbara drawls. She flicks another switch and zooms in on the seeping Breach. The camera shakes and a torrent of bubbles bursts up. “Back up, Black Bat!”

Cass pedals backwards in the water, wings stabilizing her, and stands at the ready, lights flickering off her serious, _young_ face. Officially now with her maiden voyage begun, she is the youngest ever Jaeger pilot.

Barbara’s gut swoops with nerves on Cass’s behalf, but she stays focused. “Steady, steady--”

“Holy _shit!_ ”

She really can’t blame Carrie for her outburst.

From the Breach bursts a kaiju bristling in spikes, three pairs of eyes, vicious, slitted blue, and rows and rows of needle teeth. Footage isn’t fantastic, but they can see its strange, elongated head.

“Data shows that larger kaiju heads do house bigger brains, but it might not necessarily indicate greater intelligence, according to Crohner et al…” Carrie babbles, nerves clearly overcoming her. “Shit. Holy shit,” she says again.

“Got that the first time, Carrie,” Barbara says testily as she turns up the volume in her comms, wanting to hear what’s going on at Cass’s end better.

Black Bat claws her way up a rocky outcropping and stares down the kaiju in all six of its eyes. Lightning lashes the sky, reflection forking down her helmet. Suddenly, the kaiju makes a swipe at her. Feinting, Black Bat dives down into the ocean.

“Black Bat headed your way, Amazon Thunder. Going at about 40 knots, so be sure to clear out the way.”

The kaiju follows, swiping at Black Bat with long claws, translucent skin stretching between its digits. Ducking and rolling, Black Bat avoids the thrust of the deadly sharp claws, but she also sinks herself deeper, closer to the kaiju’s side.

“The webbing!” she can hear Carrie shout, and really, is this the time to remark on morphological features of the kaiju--ah. Just as she’s about to tell Cass to rip into the webbing, Black Bat’s already on it.

While Black Bat’s light on heavy-duty weapons, her hands have razor sharp “nails,” and she shreds the tender webbing. Kaiju blood explodes out into the water.

Roaring, the kaiju gives chase, and Black Bat leads it along. 

“Towards Amazon Thunder,” Helena barks. “I don’t want you stuck out at deep sea with that thing.”

“North-northw--” Barbara begins. “--yeah.”

Cass’s spatial reasoning must have kicked in, as she diverts course and powers up the thrusters, shooting out for Amazon Thunder, kaiju a breadth behind.

“Coming in hot,” Barbara calls to Amazon Thunder.

Side-stepping the bullet that is Black Bat with a loud splash, Amazon Thunder fires up its pulse guns. Helena hits the switch, and they fire a shot right in the kaiju’s side.

The kaiju’s groan rends the air as it surfaces, but the shot of electricity doesn’t slow it down at all. Turning, the kaiju clamps onto Amazon Thunder’s arm on Grace’s side. With a horrible screech of metal, it rips it clean off.

Flying out of the water, Black Bat barrels into the kaiju’s injured side, knocking it away from accessing the damaged Jaeger.

Barbara steadies her breath. Stops herself from clamping her hands over her ears. Pushes away the phantom pressure at her waist. “Amazon Thunder, do you read.”

“We’re good,” Grace calls back. “Tell Harper we’re real sorry. That was our good arm.”

“Keep moving, you two,” Helena commands. “Black Bat, regroup, stay close to Amazon Thunder.”

“You’re not taking on water?” Barbara asks, surprised, while she anxiously watches Black Bat dart out of the kaiju’s grasp again. It’s managing to push her backward once more.

“Nah,” says Grace, powering up again, walking their Jaeger backwards.

“Harper engineered the arms and legs to clamp off when there’s damage--loss of limbs won’t result in taking on water,” Anissa reports as Amazon Thunder comes up right beside Black Bat.

“Uh, guys? You’re heading for shore,” Carrie pipes up tentatively. “And King Tut over there’s leaking radiation and toxins.”

“Funnily enough, it’s not as easy as it looks,” Grace retorts. “Look, we’re not _trying_ to take the kaiju for a day on the beach. What did you say--King Tut?”

All are silent for a moment as the kaiju rises to full height. It roars, frills inside its mouth waving and rows of teeth glistening in another fork of lightning.

“Yikes,” Carrie mumbles. “King Tut because of the elongated skull. Like an Egyptian pharaoh. I think deforming the skull was a status symbol in some cultures.”

Helena interrupts, “Egyptology aside, you do need to get to shore. Amazon Thunder, too risky to go around back of the kaiju like you did last time?”

A moment’s pause before Grace and Anissa say in chorus, “No,” “We can do that.” They pull the Jaeger around and go to catch the kaiju.

Unfortunately, this kaiju’s faster. Smarter. Has learned from what has been done to its predecessors. It swings its tail, catching Amazon Thunder clean across the middle and flinging her clear across the ocean.

“Amazon Thunder! Deploy wings!” Helena screams, throwing the autopilot switch. Wings pop out and slow Amazon Thunder’s weighty splash into the ocean, but the Jaeger begins to sink. They still have plenty of oxygen in there. Doesn’t mean it’s safe. 

They can at least hear their grunts and indistinct talking to each other, so they know they haven’t been knocked out.

“Black Bat--” Helena hesitates. “Go pull them out.”

It’s not a decision Barbara envies Helena. On the shore are scores of lives, and the kaiju’s charging straight at them, but Black Bat might not be able to do much without Amazon Thunder even if she went after the kaiju right away.

“Hey, no need,” Anissa says. Just before Black Bat reaches them, the Jaeger twists in the water and bounces back up to the surface. “Hell yeah! I wasn’t nominated ‘Most Promising Pilot’ in our Academy graduating class for nothing.”

“Don’t forget two time-Copilots of the Year,” Grace tacks onto that. Of course, that was back in their early days, before Grace’s feuding with PPDC higher-ups and bureaucratic shuffling-around landed them in the Icebox. 

Point is, they’ve still got it: now they’re moving at a clip to shore, Black Bat swimming fast behind them. The Jaeger’s wings give Cass a definite advantage.

“Best chance is to attack from both sides.” Barbara remembers a Cat III she and James took on with another L.A. team. “Simultaneous punches.”

“Don’t shock up, though, that just pissed King Tut off,” Carrie cuts in.

“If we get out of this alive, I’m going to kill you, Carrie,” Grace growls down the line.

“Promises,” Carrie says airily.

Helena leans into the comm. “Ready, Amazon Thunder, Black Bat?”

Nod from Cass, “aye” from Anissa, and the two Jaegers pull back their fists (Amazon Thunder’s only remaining fist), charging the kaiju from either side. The shock of the impact knocks them both back, and the kaiju doubles over on itself. 

For a few long seconds, all they hear is splashing water.

The kaiju--King Tut, Barbara’s brain supplies annoyingly--still hasn’t risen, and the cockpit cam of Amazon Thunder shows Grace and Anissa exchanging puzzled glances. They even fire up their electricity again, thinking maybe they can shock it while it’s down.

 _Boom._ With an explosive crack of its tail, Tut propels itself forward toward shore.

“You’ve gotta get that tail!” Carrie yells. “It’s Tut’s main weapon!”

Black Bat launches herself at the tail. Engaging the sharp nails again, she digs into the meat of the tail and holds on for dear life. No matter how much Tut swings its tail around, it can’t dislodge Black Bat. She just keeps clawing her way higher.

So Tut keeps going. It lunges for shore, and Cass stays latched on his back.

“What’s the plan, Black Bat?” Barbara asks, sharp only out of worry.

Cass makes a noise that, _very worryingly,_ sounds like “I don’t know.”

Helena must be frantic, too, just hiding it better than Barbara. A kaiju on shore spells disaster/ And right now, Tut’s already closer to the Shatterdome than the Breach. “Like in the sim. Can you take it to the rocks?” 

Amazon Thunder’s giving chase to both now. “We want to fire, but we might hit Black Bat. Black Bat, do you copy?”

They can hear Cass’s small huff of exertion as she swings the Jaeger around, clinging to the thrashing kaiju’s back, almost horizontal. Amazon Thunder’s shot sizzles as it hits. All it does is make Tut writhe harder so that Black Bat has to dig her heels into the flesh of its back. 

Fruitless.

“Forget it!” Anissa yells. “Let Black Bat take it to the rocks, and we’ll try to cut it off from the front.” Amazon Thunder begins to lumber in front of the Jaeger, right in the path of its claws. She lists off-balance because of the lack of her heavy arm, but she stays upright.

Working her propellers, Cass tries to push the kaiju towards the rocks. A huge swell slapped up by Amazon Thunder shoves them up towards the outcropping, and Black Bat rolls Tut under. There’s a sickening crunch, and no one in LOCCENT can tell who hit first.

“That was the kaiju!” Grace reports. 

“Cass, you okay?” Anissa asks quickly.

“Okay,” Cass confirms. Another crunch and scrape and Black Bat hauls herself up on the rocks, trying to drag Tut with her. They wrestle on the rocks, water spraying off scratched hull and wounded skin. Black Bat almost manages to pin Tut, but Tut flips her over and crunches her into the rock like a beetle. 

God. God, no. “Cass!” Barbara shouts. “Do you copy?”

Shaken, Cass dips a nod. Unhurt, then. But all is far from well.

Bracing its haunches, Tut leaps off of a rock and launches itself high, high into the air. 

Barbara tries to keep the dread finality out of her voice when she says aloud what they all know. “It’s too late, it’s headed for Anchorage.”


	9. Perfect

Helena slams the meat of her palm down onto the red alert button, and the alarm sounds through the Shatterdome. It will alert city police, hospitals, and the rest of the PPDC as well as nearby military of multiple nations.

Carrie bites back a cry, the door bangs open, Harper barges inside, the sirens wail, Helena grits her teeth, and it’s chaos, it’s _chaos._

Barbara has to focus on Cass right now, or they’ll never make it through. “You’ll have to follow on land. Might take a moment to adjust to moving out of water.”

Black Bat pushes herself upright on her hands, then swings her body around and jumps down onto the beach, running towards the city. At first, Black Bat does wobble. The slipperiness of the sand can’t help. To Cass’s credit, it’s not for long, and she rapidly gets a hang of how fast and with how much force she has to move to cover decent ground in the city. Marching through Anchorage in the sluicing rain, she avoids cars and fleeing pedestrians to the best of her ability.

“Wait, wait, let me at the monitors--” Harper pushes forward.

Helena speaks over her. “You shouldn’t be here, Kelley’s only here because of exceptional circumstances--”

“These are exceptional circumstances,” Barbara says tersely without looking away from Cass, who’s struggling but moving as fast as she can. With difficulty, she’s driving the Jaeger forward, along the coast rather than deeper inland. “Let her stay.”

“Alpha Alert has been sounded,” Helena intones into the PA. For Leslie’s benefit, Barbara guesses, since the rest of them are here in this room or out there. “In these circumstances, scientific personnel are considered civilians and are not mandated to stay.” Ah. Scientific personnel. “I am required by international law to inform you that you may choose to proceed down to the bunkers until Alpha Alert is over.”

Being dismissed as a civilian is a little tiny ouch. But for Barbara, it doesn’t change a thing. She doesn’t imagine it changes a thing for any of them. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Harper and Carrie freeze. A hurried half-turn away from Cass so that Barbara can shake her head at Helena and say, “I’m staying” reveals that their mouths have all but fallen open.

“We’re not leaving--”

“--Are you kidding?”

“Good, it’s settled, Team Icebox, Kumbaya,” Grace drawls. “Anybody got a game plan? Kid can’t keep this up for much longer.”

“Move along in the shallows parallel to them--don’t get deeper than you need to,” Barbara says. She checks back on the Breach. Oozing open, but nothing else coming out of it right now, which is a damn relief.

“You got it.” Amazon Thunder hauls her heavy body around and lumbers along the shore, mirroring Black Bat’s inland run.

Choppers circle overhead; they can hear them even in the concrete corridors here. Helena’s secondary comm crackles.

“Yes. Yes, it’s our Jaeger.” Helena sighs as the woman on the other end shouts tinnily. “No offense, ma’am, but we have bigger fish to fry right now. Black Bat--yes, _Black Bat.”_ Increasingly irritated pause. “Black Bat needs backup.”

Harper switches to a news feed on her laptop. In the live footage, guns target the kaiju. Right after K-Day, the military developed special guns to penetrate their skins, and for a while early K-scientists thought it would solve the problem altogether.

However, kaiju aren’t tanks. They can think. 

And they are always, always more terrifying than imaginable.

Just as Black Bat skids around the corner of a tall building in a shower of sparks, Tut hinges open its monstrous jaw and gulps down the bullets like a kid popping M&M’s into her mouth.

“What’s going on?” Anissa shouts. “Are the choppers helping?”

“Tut just drank lead,” Carrie says shakily. “So I’d say, um, soft no.”

Swinging its long tail, Tut demolishes an entire building, glass shattering and spraying. As a chopper tries to escape the blast, Tut grabs it by the skids and throws it into a second building. 

The pilots parachute out just in time, and the buildings have all been evacuated, the anchor reports in a quavering voice. Barbara can only hope she’s right.

It’s a narrow miss when Black Bat jumps over Tut’s tail, but charging at it just gets her batted aside. Only speedy footwork keeps her from plowing backwards through a third building.

At this point, PPDC decides a video call is the solution, and Helena’s all tied up in trying to explain the unauthorized Jaeger.

Focus, Barbara, focus. “Cass--”

When Cass hears her, she looks straight into the cockpit cam.

Barbara wants to say _remember your training,_ but that isn’t right. She squares her jaw. “Remember what you can do.”

Cass’s eyes go wide. That wild intelligence in them. Wrapping both hands around a street lamp, Black Bat drags it up from the ground with a nails-on-chalkboard sound. 

The PPDC higher-ups on call with Helena increase the volume of their complaints (“Infrastructural damage---” “A _child_ \--”) until Barbara can’t take it anymore. One hand shooting out, she pulls the plug on that monitor.

A breath of silence in LOCCENT.

Helena lets out a near-hysterical laugh. “We’re screwed.”

“Royally screwed,” Barbara agrees. “Get ‘em, Cass!”

Black Bat braces her feet on the asphalt and just as Tut turns, she slams the makeshift staff straight across its ugly mug.

There’s a spray of gore, and Carrie hisses through her teeth. Non-negligible amount of radiation, too, Barbara’s very aware. “Now’s the time to drive Tut back into the water!” Barbara tells her through her worry.

As Tut stumbles, the choppers change course and circle around its head, trying to disorient it further. Trying to drive it backwards. And it begins to work, especially with Black Bat prodding it with her staff, powering forward.

“Wait, Cass, I have something for you to use.” Harper steps forward, successfully this time. “Throwing stars. Press the button at your waist, it’ll release them.”

“Really? When you were going to bring that up?” Barbara deadpans.

“When it became relevant.”

Black Bat pops the panel at her waist and takes the throwing stars in her hands. She throws one into the kaiju’s stomach, and it explodes. Shoves it backwards another pace. They’re finally making progress.

“Amazon Thunder, get ready to catch,” Helena says. Another crackle from her comm tails her words. She ignores it.

Amazon Thunder gives the affirmative. “Batter up!”

As the ungainly party lurches down the beach, the kaiju stumbles and falls. It falls backwards onto a building that begins to crumple like cardboard.

A building none other than their very own little Cafe Dazed.

“The owners refused to evacuate--” explains the anchor, and there’s movement in the windows. That cashier, that barista, they’re still in there.

No one’s thinking about bets right now.

Black Bat grabs the kaiju before it can crush all the way through the building, straining to pull it upright. One kick and she sends it sprawling away from the cafe. Then she dives half her body inside. When she lifts back out, she has the cashier and the barista clinging to one arm. The news cameras get a close-up shot of their terrified faces that’ll probably be hilarious in hindsight. Lifting Black Bat’s other hand, Cass reveals the cafe’s piglet mascot carefully cupped in her palm.

“Will you forget the pig and focus on the fight--what are you doing with her?” Barbara’s exasperated.

For once, Cass doesn’t miss a beat. “Copilot.”

Dropping the two people gently on the floor, pig still in hand, she winds up her fist and punches Tut in the face as it rises again. 

But the kaiju’s fight hasn’t burned out. Never will be, that’s what Barbara has learned. They don’t do fatigue. 

They don’t do _failure._

And neither does Cass.

One-armed, as she hasn’t had a chance to put down the piglet yet, she punches Tut as it rises, trying to distract it, trying to keep it from swatting all the helicopters out of the air. They trample the ruins of the now-vacant Cafe Dazed.

Battling their way backwards. Battling their way to shore. At last. 

“We’re in place!” Amazon Thunder shoots hooks into the kaiju from behind and begins to drag it.

As Tut screams, Black Bat begins to wade into the shallows. Just before the water comes over her knees, she leans back and sets down the piglet on the shore. The piglet stands there, shaking, before animal instincts kick in, and she runs up the beach. 

Presumably squealing. Barbara would be.

It’s all going well at first. Amazon Thunder’s hauling Tut by the hooks sunk into its back. Until the hooks tear out, kaiju blood splattering across the Jaeger’s dashboard.

“The levels of exposure you’re experiencing are dangerous. You need to get into the water, don’t let those fluids stay on the glass,” Carrie tells them swiftly.

“We can’t--”

“Come on, Anissa.” Amazon Thunder treads backwards until the ocean water laps over the front of the dashboard, wipes it clean. It won’t do everything, but it’ll do something. Kaiju blood burns were no joke, every Ranger knows.

Black Bat spears at Tut with her lamp-staff, but the kaiju blocks with its long claws. It seems to be rallying, regaining its strength. Cass’s teeth are clenched tight, face grey with effort. 

They splash into the deeps, and Amazon Thunder and Black Bat’s combined efforts push at the kaiju agonizingly slowly. Tut still flails, still scores down their metal hulls. They’re both sustaining a lot of damage.

And Helena’s comm crackles _again._

“Shut that off!” multiple voices chorus.

“Marshal,” says a tense woman on the other end. “There’s been a new development. Cruise ship on the shore side of the Breach.”

Of course. Because the PPDC didn’t buy what Barbara was selling about the Cat V kaiju, they didn’t inform the docks. There were no alerts sent out to incoming and outgoing marine vessels.

“Cruise ship,” Helena repeats. “So what does that mean for our Jaegers?”

Carrie swallows hard and says, “You can’t kill the kaiju.”

Grace lets out a whistling breath through her nose. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You can’t kill the kaiju! The radiation will wipe out everybody on the cruise ship. Same reason you didn’t want to kill it in the city,” Carrie explains, talking as fast as she can.

“Carrie’s right,” Barbara cuts in--though she doesn’t know what this _means_ either, she knows enough about K-science to understand what the consequences of all that exposure would be.

“What else are we supposed to do?” Anissa sounds like she’s holding back a scream. “What the hell else do we do, Carrie?”

“Should we let it waltz around the world, eating cities for brunch?” Grace’s agitation is just as palpable.

In the cockpit cam, Cass trembles with the effort of pushing back Tut. Her eyes are screwed shut.

“It’s only theory, but--” Harper begins.

Helena’s hands come away from her forehead. “No time for _but._ Go.”

“A Jaeger’s core is strong enough that it might be able to temporarily reverse the Breach. Basically you’d have to uh, rip it out and throw it down the hatch.” Harper coughs.

“Rip it out,” Grace repeats, “and throw it down the hatch.”

“Yeah, okay.” With their one good arm, Anissa begins patting down the front of the Jaeger. “This is the core?”

“Remove the core and you’ll be going on full manual power, limited life support,” Harper warns. “This is...crazy. Probably suicidal.”

Then a soft voice. “Me.” Cass’s eyes flick up, intent.

Harper sucks in a breath.

Barbara’s hands, which haven’t stopped moving on the keys since they got to LOCCENT, stop. She stops altogether.

“Black Bat is smaller and lighter. With the core removed, you’ll have better manual control than Amazon Thunder.” Harper shakes her head. “But, Cass--”

“We can’t let you do this,” Anissa says fiercely.

“Has to be me.” Cass’s brows draw together. 

Desperation bubbles up Barbara’s throat, but all they can do now is help her. Looking Harper straight in the eye, Barbara nods. “It’s going to be you, Cass.”

There’s no time left. They just have to act. 

Harper comes in at Barbara’s elbow to tell Cass, “So keep doing what you’re doing, okay?”

The Jaegers and the kaiju cut their arduous path deeper into the ocean. Now with direction, headed back to the Breach. This has to work, has to work.

“You’re coming up on the cruise ship on your left.” Oracle’s cameras pick up the shadow of it, and the Jaeger’s outside cams show its white hull, dull grey under the moon. 

Black Bat gets in Tut’s way before it can swipe at the ship, delivering another blow. Buying time.

“Amazon Thunder, core’s behind the bat,” Harper rattles off, twisting her hands together. “You rip out the core, then...then, um, Black Bat has to grab the kaiju, dive down with it and the core, and throw them both into the Breach.” 

The core could blow up too soon. The kaiju could kill Cass. The Breach could suck her down into it. A hundred ways Barbara could lose Cass, and her brain throws them all up at once.

“Ready?” Grace asks Cass, hand to one side of the bat Barbara so lovingly painted for her.

Cass smiles.

Digging under the chest, Amazon Thunder braces with a foot and pries off the panel. She reaches in and pulls out the glowing core of the Jaeger.

Black Bat reaches out and holds her own heart under her arm. Then she attacks the slowly-turning kaiju. They crash into each other. Like a car accident. Like tragedy waiting to happen. It’s hard not to think of Snakeback and Lady Shiva.

Barbara bites down on her knuckles.

Twisting, Black Bat tangles herself up in the kaiju, wings tucked into her sides. They’re face-to-face. Cass staring up at those three vivid eyes, eyes from another world. She’s just human, after all. She’s just a girl with a bat on her chest, just like Barbara was.

What is a kaiju, after all? An animal. An animal that was a symbol of fear. That was a symbol of change. No kaiju before has been left alive on purpose.

Nothing about this is like what came before.

Barbara is nothing like who she was before.

When he and Barbara were children, James used to kill the ants that ran rampant in their backyard for sport. He’d invent new methods of their murder: heavy boots, buckets of water, magnifying glasses. When Barbara asked him once why he killed so many, he asked her in return, face blank, why they should have ants in their backyard when they could exterminate all of them.

Spiraling downwards, the water pressure pushes Cass’s face up against the dash. Separated from the three unblinking alien eyes, all the way down, down, down.

“You’re about to hit the Breach--”

This takes all of Cass’s strength. Everything she’s held onto despite the pain. Everything she has chosen to be after what she has suffered. Turning violently, she kicks, pushes Tut down. The Breach resists, and Cass pushes harder. 

She holds the core over her head. Black Bat’s arms quiver in the water.

Atlas, Barbara remembers. A Titan in the making.

With both hands, she throws the core. 

The Breach yawns wider and wider and then _reverses._

Like Harper said, it begins to pull rather than push. Rocks and seaweed rip straight into it, and it bowls Tut backwards.

With both feet, Cass kicks Tut.

In a blink, gone so fast it might have never emerged, Tut disappears into the Breach.

LOCCENT erupts.

Harper’s gasping for breath, Carrie’s rambling something again. Helena’s in disbelief. Over the mic, Amazon Thunder is a riot of sound. Barbara’s heart pounds so hard it adds to the cacophony in her head.

But it’s not over yet.

“Almost there.”

Ocean sucks downwards. The Breach seals up again, pulses dropping down to ambient levels. But the ocean waters still pull down, inescapable, Charybdis.

Like she did in the lab, Cass screams.

But this time, her family hears her. Barbara hears her. Cass will not share her mother’s fate. “Cass. Come back to me. Swim up. Swim up. We have you.”

Barbara wishes for strong legs, she wishes for a body that could cut the ocean waters, she wishes like she could save Cass like no one saved her, like Cass has saved her.

Black Bat kicks up against the current, and she’s persevering, and she’s not alone--Amazon Thunder reaches down her one hand, and clasps it around hers.

And they break surface.

“Pop open the hatch, she can’t have much oxygen left,” Harper says hurriedly.

“And you two better get out of there, too,” Carrie adds.

Barbara sinks her face into her hands, shoulders shaking. It’s over. It’s over. 

“Okay?” Cass whispers, just to her amid the cacophony of Helena plugging in the PPDC comm again, Carrie and Harper in hysterics, Amazon Thunder partying it up.

“I’m okay. Are _you_ okay?” Barbara asks, incredulous.

“Okay.” Cass laughs a little, but her fatigue is obvious. “Fun,” she adds.

“Fun--? If you think I’m ever letting you do that again, young lady--” 

Helena places a hand on her shoulder. “You ever heard ‘We all turn into our parents’?”

Barbara glowers before she relents, slumping back into her chair. Her heart will slow. Eventually. 

By now, both Jaegers have opened up their hatches and the three pilots have climbed up, sitting perched on their hulls.

Unhooking the cockpit cam, Grace winks into it, then holds it up to show off the furiously-waving passengers and crew on the cruise ship, as if things needed to be any more surreal.

The rain ceases. The ocean stills.

From behind the cloudbank, the slate-shaded buildup of a long dark night, a sweet orange slice of sun peeks out.

Closing her eyes, Cass smiles into it, and Barbara smiles, too.


	10. Speak

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was my first long fic, and in the end, i'm pretty happy and proud.

“Remind me again why they’re allowing this kind of audience.” Barbara buttons her cardigan one-handed as she pushes forward down the tarmac. 

This will be the first time in two weeks that the Icebox crew has returned to the Shatterdome. 

The afternoon after Cass forced Tut back into the Breach, the PPDC ordered them to exit the facility. Since then, they have been housing the seven of them in a hotel. Actually, the eight of them. Despite her technical lack of culpability on the day of the fight, Leslie insisted that her medical opinions were what led to Cass and the crew going as far off-book as they did. 

So all of them have waited on edge for these two weeks, and today, they will finally finish this as they have begun it: together.

“I don’t like it, either.” Helena strides forward, medals glinting off her uniform, cap at a no-nonsense angle. Not for the first time, Barbara is grateful that Helena is on her side. “It’s more like a movie premier than a summit.” It’s true--the walkway cordoned off with reporters and public alike pressing at the ropes, waving and cheering, phones up and cameras flashing.

“Better a summit than a hearing…” It was touch and go for a while there. 

Barbara thinks the biggest influence on their decision to discuss rather than prosecute has been the public; court-martialing would have resulted in an uproar that would damage the Corps’ reputation for years to come. 

To the people of Anchorage, to the world, Cass was not a criminal, but a hero.

And Cass? Cass is living it up. She wiggles her fingers shyly at a reporter angling for pictures before she scoots over and pops up in front of a waving couple instead to take a selfie with them. Ah. The cashier and the barista from Cafe Doomed. Between them, they hold that one very lucky piglet.

“The pig’s name is Pilot,” Carrie tells Barbara with no small amount of glee when she catches up to them. Barbara suspects her of being so slow because she was gossiping with any poor K-scientist who congratulated her.

“What are you _wearing?”_

Carrie’s in some ridiculous tweed number that looks older than Barbara’s PhD advisor. She adjusts her waistcoat. “It’s _vintage.”_

Harper joins them a moment later, tuxedoed, blue hair up in a bun. She blows kisses to the cameras.

“You’re all taking this very lightly,” Barbara comments to both young women, wanting to impress the seriousness of the summit. “We could be out of a job. We could be thrown in _federal prison_ for treason.” 

After PPDC authorities gave them the go-ahead for outside contact, she called her father, who to her gratitude didn’t comment on how long it had been since he had last spoken to his daughter. Certainly, when he discussed Tut’s attack on Anchorage, he thought their team committed serious grievance. Under pressure, though, he admitted he would have made the same decision as Helena. He said that he wouldn’t like to think of what would have happened if they hadn’t done what they had done, stupid, reckless, and irresponsible as it might have been.

“And we’ll have gone out in a blaze of glory, so what’s your point?” Harper stares after Cass. “She’s living it up.”

A brunette girl leans over the cordon and before security can push her back, manages to get into Cass’s hand a single red rose. Cass, looking the picture of a miniature Sandra Wu-San in her elegant dress (they finally did that shopping trip), winks.

“That’s enough.” Hands on their backs, Helena steers both Cass and Carrie (she’s picked up an argument with a BBC science reporter about the Category V classification of the now officially-named Tutankhamen) into the Anchorage Shatterdome’s dusted-off conference hall, and Harper and Barbara follow soon after.

Grace and Anissa, in formal dress, are already seated with Leslie. Towards the middle of the sloping seats, she can see Carolyn Wu-San, whose face has been all over the news, too. Her role in all of this has been questioned extensively. Cass keeps glancing up at her and for good reason. The matter of Cass’s guardianship may well be decided soon, too.

Vertigo at that thought.

So Barbara looks past Carolyn’s head. In the far rows, Barbara glimpses a glint. 

Her brother. Her brother, seemingly placid, but so much more hiding behind that face. Someone who she treated with suspicion and distance throughout her childhood, yet someone who she relied on in moments of great danger as an adult. And he had come through. And they had worked together. Maybe there was more alike between them than she thought, and maybe she had to come to terms to that as something not as awful as it seemed, something that didn’t have to stay in the shadows. Jury was still out on that one.

Beside him--her throat aches. It’s so dim in the back of the hall that she sees just a suggestion of his face, but it’s her father. She doesn’t need light to see his face, she knows so well his bristly mustache, his floppy hair, the kindness of his eyes behind his glasses. In thinking she failed as his daughter because of her career-ending injury, for a long time now, she has forgotten how to be his daughter altogether. 

She has a lot of changes to make. And today the scales will weigh all of the rules they have violated and all the lives they have saved and see how the balance tips.

A small hand finds hers, and when Barbara turns to look at her face, Cass nods. Barbara nods back, takes a breath, and holds herself straight upright in her chair as Helena steps up to the podium.

They’ve done everything they can, and Anchorage tells half their tale. They’re going to tell the rest of their story now and on their own terms. 

Barbara snatched back control of her own life from the hands of a monster and helped Cass do the same. She eked out a new destiny for herself and watched Cass write her own future.

In the hotel, they rehearsed each of their presentations a hundred times. Nevertheless, no matter what they say now, what happens to them afterwards is largely out of their hands. 

With Cass’s slender fingers locked around hers, Barbara can’t be as afraid as she might be without her.

 

Swinging her legs on the exam table, Cass vigorously towels her short, shiny hair.

“Stop getting hair all over my clinic,” Leslie growls without heat. She’s combing the room for a single bandage out of place after a month her clinic has spent under someone else’s care.

The PPDC are hemming and hawing to the press and the governments about possible repercussions still, but Barbara thinks they’ve already made up their mind, considering that they’ve allowed the Shatterdome crew to return home. 

The rest of the world has made up their mind.

Cass has been routinely refusing interviews and photoshoots, though Carrie and Harper did give her an assist with an AMA yesterday. In solidarity, neither has Amazon Thunder indulged the press much. Grace and Anissa are caught up in accelerated wedding planning, anyway.

So it’s quiet around here, and Barbara’s glad for it.

“This is for you.” Barbara hands her a package doing its best not to be hopelessly lumpy. With two disparately-shaped presents, Barbara’s neat wrapping can’t even save it.

Cass drops the towel--Leslie picks it up with a sigh--and reaches for the package. She peels it open. When she pulls out the stuffed animal, her face lights up. Turning it around, she wiggles its paw at Barbara. “Is...this--” Today doesn’t seem to be a good day for words.

“You know what it is,” Barbara reminds her with a smile. “It’s a monkey.”

Mischief glints in Cass’s eyes. She shakes her head like she doesn’t know.

With a quick glance at Leslie, Barbara sighs and then resignedly does her damn monkey impersonation.

Cass laughs and gives the monkey a hug. She looks down over its ears at the wrapping.

“Don’t forget your other present,” Barbara encourages, wheeling forward.

Reaching in, Cass withdraws a book. Monkey in her lap, she burns holes in the covers with her eyes.

“It’s an ASL book. Harper says she has some textbooks and materials from college you could borrow, too. There are video tutorials online as well, I’ve seen them. Or you could take classes.” Realizing she’s just talking to fill space, Barbara seals her lips. Well. One last thing. She has to address what made her buy the ASL book in the first place. “Then maybe you could use the cards just for reading and writing instead?”

Cass still says nothing, and Leslie throws Barbara a little concerned look as she ducks out of the room, saying something about needing to talk to Carrie. 

“I’m sorry, I was...I’m just trying to help.” Barbara rubs the back of her neck. “You don’t have to use the book. I just wanted--it’s hard for me to see you hurting...I--”

After another moment of Barbara fumbling, Cass picks up the stack of the cards sitting by the clinic sink. Picking up a pen, she makes a writing motion at the page, then points at Barbara.

“You want me to write, too?” At her eager nod, Barbara finds a blank card and a pen. “Okay.” Maybe she can express to Cass what she’s really trying to say then. “Should I count down from ten and then we show each other?”

Already carefully etching, Cass gives another, more distracted nod.

“One, two, three, four--”

Cass caps the pen and holds up her card. The second she sees Barbara’s, she crosses the room to her and throws herself into her arms.

Barbara crushes her to her chest. The hand holding up her card shakes. “Jeez, my card kinda comes up short now, huh?” she says around the abrupt lump in her throat.

In Cass’s hands, big, painstakingly-formed, mangled but clearly readable letters: 

_SISTER_

Cass shakes her head vigorously. Pulling back, she traces her fingers over what Barbara has written, face full of wonder. Full of that deep, dancing joy that even more than her brilliant mind makes her remarkable.

In Barbara’s self-conscious scrawl:

_COPILOT_


End file.
